The Incident
by AkwardChit
Summary: Twenty years after their crime fighting days, Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup are in very different places. Something happened years ago, something that none of the former Powerpuff Girls like to talk about. But the way their lives are going now begs the question: What happened? Read as the past slowly reveals itself, to you and me alike.
1. Chapter 1 (Blossom)

Blossom was soaking wet by the time a cab finally pulled over. She yanked the door open and jumped in, and then slammed the door shut again. Her raincoat had decided not to work that day, and water was trickling in from the collar and the insides of the pockets. Her shoes were a soggy mess.

"It's really raining cats and dogs, isn't it?" She said to the cab driver in an effort to ignore the puddle her seat was becoming.

"Sure is. Where to?" The driver turned his head to see his passenger. "Hey, I know you! You're Blossom! I voted for you, ya know."

"You did?" Blossom wasn't really expecting that, because she had lost the election by an embarrassingly wide margin. "Well, thank you very much."

"Well, where to, then?"

"Psychiatric Hospital of Townsville, please."

The driver glanced sympathetically over his shoulder as he told her the price and took the money. "Going from a funeral home to a mental hospital? You must lead a pretty depressing life, don't you?"

"Can we please just go? I'm sort of in a hurry." She wasn't actually in _that_ much of a hurry, but she didn't want to talk to a stranger about dead people or crazy people at just that moment.

The driver blushed with embarrassment at his own nosiness. "Of course." He started driving without another word.

The white noise of the rain helped Blossom think. That wasn't always a good thing. Now Blossom was thinking about, or if she was honest, dwelling on, the election. She should have known she would lose, especially to the prominent and beloved symbol of order Ms. Bellum was. Mayor of Townsville, what was she thinking? She couldn't be mayor, not with the Incident tagged to her name for life. And besides, everyone liked Ms. Bellum, including Blossom herself. How are you supposed to defeat your opponent if you don't even really think you should?

Blossom had thought that it was her ultimate goal to be mayor of Townsville, to have a chance to lead again for the first time since she was a child. Ever since the Incident, she had been studying the science of politics and the art of debate at whatever school and institution had been willing to accept her. She had worked slowly but steadily to try and rebuild public confidence in at least one former Powerpuff Girl. She thought that by now, she had done enough for her image to give her a fighting chance in the election. So much for that. As soon as she entered the hopeless race, a swarm of journalists and news reporters destroyed her with reminders to the people of the Incident. She could have responded with stories of her crime fighting days in kindergarten, but no one wants to hear that their leaders reached the pinnacle of their lives as children, and went downhill from there. Besides, Chemical X was outlawed for a reason, and the people didn't want to acknowledge that they had depended on the substance to keep their city safe.

Keeping the city safe. That was Ms. Bellum's job now, as it had been for the last twenty years. The thing was, Townsville didn't need children to keep them safe from monsters anymore. Funding from Washington and a local budget heavy on defense had really beefed up Townsville's military protection against the monsters that attacked the city all too frequently. Even on a smaller scale, a more powerful police force, equipped with the latest technology, all but eliminated crime in a city formerly plagued with one of the worst violent crime rates in the country. Ms. Bellum didn't plan on irreparably undermining Blossom's campaign her success and experience that; Ms. Bellum, actually, was one of the few people that was still on good terms with Blossom. She would always wish Blossom good luck before a debate or interview, and she always made sure that the competition was friendly.

But the voters didn't know that. All they knew was that Ms. Bellum had a history of good times to back her campaign. What did Blossom have? The Incident, and the promise to ruin Townsville for good this time around. No wonder she lost.

It didn't help, either, that Professor Utonium got sick in the last week of Blossom's campaign. He had been hospitalized as a result the Incident, and though he completely recovered short a few missing limbs, his health deteriorated in bursts in the years that followed. Countless times, he had been inches away from death with a disease no doctor could identify. He had always recovered, but in that last week…

It was Professor Utonium's funeral she was getting the cab ride from. Professor Utonium, the loving father who had raised her, was gone. Another victim of the Incident, though not as immediate as the others had been. Blossom didn't want to be crying next to a perfect stranger like this cab driver, but she was so wet from the rain that she figured a few tears here and there would blend right in. She let them trickle out.

He was really gone. Like the old Mayor of Townsville, who still haunted her in her sleep. Like Mojo Jojo, who she had realized all too late was not the villain, but the victim. Like Ms. Keane, whose body was never found. All victims of the Incident. Blossom couldn't help but feel like it was all her fault. She was in charge when it happened, after all…

"We're here." The driver nearly made Blossom jump out of her skin. He turned his head when her seat squished as she unbuckled her seat belt. "I'm sorry, but I thought I heard you crying."

Was she really that loud, that he could hear over the rainstorm? "No, I wasn't."

"Oh." The driver, again aware of his awkward interest in her personal life, looked away.

"Have a good day," Blossom said to the driver on her way out of the cab and into the rain. She was glad that she could remember to be nice. There's no need to ruin someone else's day just because yours isn't going so well. Or if there's promise that it won't be pleasant.

Not all of the victims of the Incident were dead. Blossom didn't consider herself one, because she could still think clearly. But as for her sisters…

Blossom had given up entirely on being dry and was dripping all over the mats that building have for you to wipe your feet on. Her shoes squeaked with each step and left a trail leading up to the front desk.

"How may I help you today?" an old lady behind the counter asked.

"I'd like to visit someone, please."

"Okay." She tapped something on a computer screen. "Your name and patient's name?"

"Blossom. And I'm seeing my sister, Buttercup."


	2. Chapter 2 (Buttercup)

Punch. Punch. Punch.

Buttercup was working up a sweat. A really good, hard sweat.

Punch. Punch. Punch.

That punching bag had never seen such a punch before. If it wasn't impressed yet, it would be now.

Punch!

Buttercup's slightly bloody bare hands shot a hole clean through the bag. No laser beam or anything. God no, definitely _not _a laser beam. Buttercup shivered. Not a laser beam. Never a laser beam.

No, her hand went through all by itself. Barely a trace of Chemical X. It felt good.

"Wow, you're strong!" Buttercup complimented herself jokingly. She was alone in the gym, so no one else could say it.

"Thanks, Buttercup!" she replied, "You're not so bad yourself."

Then, a knock on the door. From the sound of the knock, it could only mean one thing.

"Blossom!" Buttercup ripped her hand out of the punching bag and nearly constricted her damp sister to coughs. Not to death, of course. Never to death. But almost to coughs.

"Hey, Buttercup." Blossom peeled Buttercup off of her. Literally peeled her off, because she was wet and all.

"Why are you wet?" Buttercup looked at the streaks on her sister's face more than her soggy clothes. Buttercup squinted. "Were you crying?"

Blossom hesitated. Why did she hesitate? "No, it was raining outside." She sort of sighed. It could have just been a breath. "I have to tell you something, Buttercup. I'm technically not allowed to, but I thought you should know."

"Yeah, sure. Tell me." Then Buttercup actually thought about what Blossom said. "Why aren't you allowed to tell me?"

Blossom half-sighed again. It was like she was _trying_ to be depressing, or something. "You know… sensitive topics… sometimes set you off."

Buttercup suddenly felt like screaming at the top of her lungs that it wasn't true, but she didn't. It wouldn't exactly help, now, would it? "Just because I _am _in a mental home doesn't mean I _should be_." See, she could be calm. "I can handle it." Nailed it. Definitely nailed it.

"I never said I thought you should be here." Blossom probably agreed with Buttercup. "Other people decided that. Besides, if I thought you couldn't handle it, then why would I be telling you?"

The question was rhetorical, but Buttercup didn't realize it. "Because you need an outlet?" The answer was pretty rhetorical, too, but it looked like Blossom took it very seriously. It wasn't supposed to be that serious, but Blossom looked pretty serious.

Blossom pulled herself together with the half-sigh again. God, that sigh was depressing, even if it was just a breath. "It's about the Professor."

Oh no. Oh God, no. Buttercup got a pit in her stomach. It hurt, really. "What about him?" she said as non-panicky as she could. But it was hard, because the last time she saw her father, he was in the hospital…

Blossom didn't do anything or say anything.

"What about him?" Buttercup said louder. Quite a bit louder, actually. The time she had last seen Professor Utonium, before seeing him in the hospital, was during the Incident.

Blossom got all watery-eyed, and looked almost pityingly at her sister. Or maybe lovingly. Hell, Buttercup didn't know. But Blossom still said nothing.

"What about him?" Buttercup was practically screaming. The Incident… all the things she had done, to the Professor. To Bubbles, and countless others. It was all coming back. Buttercup hated it. "What about him?" she yelled again. "Where's the Professor, I wanna talk to him!"

Then her sister turned her head. "Never mind, I shouldn't have brought it up. Forget I said anything." She almost tried leaving. She actually was about to just leave like that. Just walk away and not come back.

"Oh no you don't!" Buttercup grabbed her sister's arm really hard, so hard that it almost hurt. Not so much that Blossom screamed, but it still probably hurt a lot. She didn't want Blossom to scream, but Buttercup was definitely screaming. "Where's the Professor?" She spun Blossom the hell around and stared straight into her pink eyes. She was probably terrifying.

Blossom didn't say much, but then Buttercup sort of shook her. Not a violent shake, but a pretty nasty one nonetheless. "He passed…" Blossom choked on her own words.

"Passed what?" Buttercup was still shaking Blossom, but only because she was shaking herself. She was shaking quite a lot, actually. "Passed some test? Passed a kidney stone?"

Blossom took too long to answer.

"Did he pass a kidney stone?" Buttercup continued. "I can give him a kidney if he needs it. I'm not using both. Just give me a minute."

Blossom grabbed Buttercup's wrist before she gouged her own kidney out barehanded. "He passed away."

Oh no. Oh God, no. Another one down… "Like, just a little bit, or…"

"He's dead." Blossom was finally free of Buttercup's grip, because she was too shocked to hold on. Blossom rubbed her arms where Buttercup had grabbed her, but Buttercup didn't notice.

"No." There were all too many people that already died years ago, in the Incident. But the Professor was not one of them. She had made a deal with a certain someone, and saved his life. She didn't like to think about it, but she had to. He promised that the Professor would stay _alive_. He couldn't have broken his promise, so the only explanation left…

"I'm sorry, Buttercup. It hurts me too. But it happened." Blossom snapped Buttercup's attention back to her.

"You're lying." Buttercup declared. "You're lying. The Professor is not dead. He's just fine, in the hospital. You're lying, and that makes you a liar. Liar!"

Then what Blossom did, she hugged Buttercup. "It will be okay, Buttercup. Just remember that. It will always be okay, eventually." And with that, she just left.

Buttercup did something crazy then. It was crazy because she knew she'd get all subdued and all by those annoying nurse people if she did it. She did it anyways, though. She burst through the gym doors, and saw Blossom not quite out of the hallway yet. She banged so hard on the wall next to her that the dents left in the wall were painted red with Buttercup's blood. It got her attention, but Blossom didn't turn around. Buttercup yelled as loud as she could, which was pretty loud.

"You're a liar, Blossom! The Professor's just fine! You're a damned liar!"

She shouldn't have said that. Blossom never lies, as far as she knew. But the Professor wasn't dead, as far as she knew, either. Before she could shout anything else to Blossom, though, Blossom was gone, and Buttercup was swarmed by nurses.


	3. Chapter 3 (Blossom)

Well, that went over beautifully, didn't it? Blossom didn't say much as she walked out of hospital, just what she had to say to be polite. It wasn't even raining much anymore when she got out, and the city lights made nighttime obsolete, so she decided to walk all the way back to her apartment. The walk gave Blossom time to think, which wasn't always a good thing.

Maybe the people who had decided to institutionalize Buttercup were correct. She couldn't just go around in public blowing up like that. Even if the Professor died. Even if it was probably their fault. Buttercup wasn't even yelling about that.

She had called Blossom a liar. A liar? Really? Who lies about their father's death? Blossom didn't lie. Sometimes, maybe, to be nice, but she never lied about anything serious.

Why was she even thinking like this? It wasn't her fault that Buttercup… lost it. Sure, this time she did pretty well. All she did was bang on a wall a bit. But it had been so many years since the time she got into the hospital, and it wasn't very comforting to think about the things she did that got her there in the first place. They were much worse… so much worse.

And what about Bubbles? Blossom hadn't seen her in years; not even so much as a glance since the Incident. She knew Bubbles had to be alive, because she had seen her fly away. But she hadn't heard from her at all since then.

Buttercup may have been insane, and she may not have been, but at least she was _there_.

Blossom's train of thought crashed on that either depressing or hopeful note, and not of her own choice. She was snapped back into reality by a hand over her mouth and a blade inches from her throat.

"Don't you dare make a single sound," the mugger said as he dragged Blossom backwards into the alleyway he had come from. He was a pretty lame mugger; literally a lame mugger, because he had a limp.

Blossom wasn't scared. A mugger? Really? Her _kindergarten _self kicked the butts of guys like this as a warm up. What a piece of cake this could have been.

"You have a purse, missus?" The mugger sounded more polite than he intimidating. "You have money? Give it up, now!" His voice sounded like that of a little kid.

Blossom couldn't just beat him up. There were laws against things like that; using Chemical X to cause violence. Even if it was in self-defense, the press would find a way to twist the story around. It wouldn't be very good for her public image if she ever ran for mayor again.

The mugger took his hand off of her mouth but kept the knife where it was. He stayed behind her, so she couldn't see him. "Where's your money?" Why didn't he just tell her to drop it on the ground or something?

"How much do you want?" Blossom didn't have time for this; she just wanted to get home and sleep. Besides, this guy didn't sound like he could do any harm.

The knife dropped from his hand, and he pulled away from her in surprise. "What did you say?"

Blossom turned around to see her attacker, if you could call it that. He had on a grey turtleneck and jeans and a grape of a head framed with giant glasses. He belonged in a classroom, not the streets. "Would a couple hundred be fine?" Blossom pulled a few bills from her surprisingly dry wallet. Blossom always kept a couple hundred in a man's wallet, because it was more convenient than lugging around a purse for your spare cash.

"I-I guess. Yeah, thanks." The man stammered and inches closer to Blossom's outstretched hand. He took the cash timidly, stared at Blossom with these wild green eyes, and then burst into a sprint deep into the bowels of the alley.

For some reason, Blossom felt inexplicably happy. Great, so now being mugged makes her happy? Maybe she should be right in that hospital with Buttercup. She picked up the knife he had dropped, stared at it a while, and then put it in her pocket.

The thing was, that guy looked like he needed the money. He looked like the type of guy who would only stoop that low for the sake of his family or something, not out of personal greed. And though twenty years ago she wouldn't have thought twice about putting his criminal butt in jail. But now, she actually cared about the person behind the…

Actually, he hadn't even been wearing a mask, had he?


	4. Chapter 4 (Buttercup)

Buttercup couldn't sleep. The pillows and sheets were too puffy and too white. Kind of like whipped cream. They were also too powdery. The dust kept getting up into Buttercup's nose. Kind of like sugar.

The sheets were always white and puffy, though, whenever Buttercup did something bad. Like grabbing a visitor by the arm, and then yelling at them and banging a wall. The nurse people didn't like that very much. They didn't like anything, really. They just wanted you to sit in your room and eat pudding and not bother them.

Buttercup couldn't sleep because of what Blossom had said. The Professor was dead. Buttercup shouldn't have called Blossom a liar. Blossom didn't lie. Blossom never lies. But Buttercup knew someone who would lie, someone who would break their promise. Someone who didn't give a single damn about honesty and integrity.

It was time for Buttercup to have a little chat with this certain someone.

Buttercup rolled slowly and quietly off the side of her bed. She didn't want to be caught, because that would be very lame. The nurse people wouldn't like it, either. She tiptoed to the front of her room and checked the door. It was locked. Good.

Then Buttercup slithered over to the far back of the room, as far away from the door as she could be. She lifted a little notch in the plastic floor tiling and removed a tile from the floor.

This was the part the nurse people wouldn't like. That's why it was good that the door was locked.

Behind the tile was a secret compartment. Buttercup pulled out a lump of chalk and five little red candles. She drew a star on the floor with the chalk, kind of like the ones on the American flag, except big enough for her to fit in the middle of it. It would be stupid to draw stars the size they were on the flag. Buttercup put one of the little red candles on each point of the star, and stood in the center of it.

This was the part Buttercup didn't like. She couldn't just lock a door to stop feeling bad about this part, though.

Buttercup took a deep breath. She didn't like this part at all. It made her stomach feel all bubbly. She didn't like it at all. Buttercup took another deep breath and let her eyes glow green. She _really _didn't like this part at all.

Lasers. Small lasers, little lasers, mini blips of lasers, but still lasers. Buttercup shot one at each candle as quickly as she could. She didn't like to think about it, because she didn't like that part. It was kind of nauseating, shooting those laser beams. It made Buttercup feel like she had eaten too much chocolate and needed to hurl it back up. She didn't hurl, though. That would have been gross.

Buttercup shut her eyes off the second all the candles were lit. God, how some people would freak out if they saw this. With good cause, but still. It took all Buttercup had not to freak herself out. All she could think of when she saw the candles were the lasers that lit them, and all she could think of when she thought of her lasers was Bubbles…

It was a pretty horrible memory. Such a bad memory, actually, that it always worked. Buttercup could always use it to ring Him up. Like right now.

The flames on the candles connected one at a time, tracing the star that Buttercup had drawn on the ground. Buttercup stepped out of the pentagram, which now had a very intense flame going, way bigger than what those little candles could pump out by themselves.

Finally, it was time for Him to come out. He burst into existence in the middle of the pentagram. Black boots and all.

"Need me back so soon?" He began without introduction in that weird voice of his. It was a really weird voice, if Buttercup thought about it. Except, she didn't think about it. Not at that moment, anyways.

"Shut up." Buttercup couldn't be too loud. People would hear her and knock on the door. "I have a question."

"Well, you don't have to be rude about it." He held one limp claw out. "But go ahead, darling, tell me what's wrong."

"Shut up. Don't call me that." Buttercup wished she could be louder. She couldn't, though. She had to get straight to the point. "You're what's wrong. You said the Professor would be okay."

He brought a claw up to the side of his face in mock astonishment. "Dear me, is he not?" He knew damn well he was not, too, but he asked anyways.

"He's dead. You know he's dead, God damn it. But you promised that he wouldn't die. You promised!" Okay, maybe that was a tad loud. Just a tad. Not too loud. But a tad too loud. Tad. What a weird word. Tad. Sounds a tad like dead, if you think hard enough.

"Did I, now? I don't seem to recall doing that." God, if there was a viler creature than Him in the universe, Buttercup hadn't found it yet. And she had been inside a snot monster, so that was really saying something. "Please," he continued after poofing up a black podium-looking thing to lean his elbow on, "regale me with all the details." And then what he did, he smiled, and sort of laughed. Buttercup hated it.

"You know damn well what you said!" Buttercup said a tad louder. "You said a soul for a soul! You said you would keep the Professor alive, if I gave you my soul! Well, you have my damned soul, so why isn't the professor alive?" Damned soul. If only Buttercup wasn't too mad to see the irony in her word choice.

"Really? Is that what you think? That _I'd _break a promise?" He put on a look of mock horror. It was really aggravating. It really was. If there was a creature that knew how to aggravate people, it was Him.

"Of course I think you'd break a promise!" God damn it, Buttercup, not so loud, she thought to herself. She was being too loud. Probably.

"Let's see." He pulled out a scroll from the inside of his boot. It was gross to think that the scroll was rubbing up against his thigh this whole time. "Master List of Sold Souls, number 2,822,537," he read in the most official sounding version of his weird voice Buttercup had ever heard. "Buttercup. Terms of purchase: Blossom, Bubbles, and Professor Utonium are not to die in pain." He let a little void build up before concluding, "I don't think I broke my promise, did I?"

"That isn't all." That wasn't all. It couldn't be. "There was a hell of a lot more than that, and you know it."

"That's what you signed to, see for yourself." He turned the list so she could see. Damn it, he was right. She did sign to that. "And I do believe that the Professor was on pain medication when he died?" What he said next sounded like it came from right _behind_ Buttercup, even though she could see Him in front of her. "No pain."

Oh crap. What the hell had Buttercup done? She had souled her sell to Satan. Wait, no that was wrong. Her head was getting fuzzy. She had sold her soul to Him. That was better. Actually, it wasn't better. She hadn't helped the Professor at all. Probably not her sisters, either. Her heart fell to her stomach. She felt all bubbly inside, kind of like when you get heartburn. She almost started crying, actually.

"Oh, are you crying dear?" It clearly brought Him lots of enjoyment. "How nice! Maybe I should be a lawyer, if this is what its like."

"I'm not crying, you son of a bitch," Buttercup sniffled, and then kind of yelled, "You lousy, criminal little damned asshole, I hope you rot in hell."

"That's kind of the point." Damn it, he made sense. Isn't it the worst when the person you hate makes sense? "And so will you, eventually. All in due time, Buttercup, all in due time." He smiled at her. God, what an evil smile. It made Buttercup want to punch something.

"Go," Buttercup mumbled. She was done. Like, really done. "Go now."

"Oh, I couldn't just leave you all alone. What if you need me again?" He reached in his pocket – thank God, not in his boots – and pulled out two chili peppers. "I'll come back if you bite one of them."

"Which one?" She hated Him, but she took the peppers anyways. God alone knows why, but she did.

He smiled again. "That's for me to know, and for your mouth to find out. Oh, and one last thing…" He screamed. Really screamed a satanic scream, a scream that made you feel uncomfortable in all the places. It was so blood-curdling that Buttercup felt like her heart was pumping yogurt. It was so loud that the candles went out, and Buttercup couldn't hear him or see him leave.

Buttercup collapsed. She hit the floor with a thud, and one of the squishy, still hot candles hit her bloody ear. Literally bloody – the scream made by Him had made her ears bleed. And now there was hot candle wax on it, so Buttercup screamed. She screamed and she rolled out of the way of that candle and into the way of another. It hit her on the leg, near her left knee. She grabbed at her burning leg, but then her bleeding ear hurt again, so she gripped that instead.

There she was, on the floor, when the nurse people came in. The door locked from the outside, by the way. She would have heard them coming if her ear wasn't bleeding. She would have seen them coming in if her eyes weren't all teary and all from the pain. She would have cared about them dragging her away to another room with even worse padding than white, puffy bed sheets if her head wasn't swimming with how screwed up she had made her life.


	5. Chapter 5 (Blossom)

It wasn't very late when Blossom finally reached her apartment. The sky was pitch-black, but it still wasn't very late. There was enough time for her to make a cup of something hot before bed.

She hung her useless raincoat on the coatrack by the door. She probably should have changed out of her damp and smelly funeral clothes and showered or something, but she really just wanted something to drink. She carefully removed her waterlogged shoes and leaned them upside down against a wall to drain all the water out. Then she went to the kitchen and turned on a light.

It wasn't very late, but it was still too late for coffee. She didn't want to be up all night. Of course, she would be up all night anyways, with the Professor's death and Buttercup blowing up and all to think about. At least, so she thought. But she didn't want her insomnia to be her own fault.

Tea? No, that has caffeine also. Hot cocoa? Yeah, that should do. Something nice and hot. Blossom took out a mug, and the milk, and…

"Where is that cocoa power?" she muttered to herself. She filed through the kitchen drawer by drawer, but found nothing but spoons, forks, knives, spices…

Suddenly, Blossom heard a loud clink behind her. Blossom whipped her head to look at what had made the noise, but it was too dark and too far away to see with the one kitchen light she had on. She walked in the direction of the noise.

It was the knife that guy had used to mug her. Probably fell out of her coat pocket. Blossom bent down and studied the little metal thing.

It wasn't even a switchblade, or anything. It was a kitchen knife. Just a regular kitchen knife. Blossom kind of laughed a bit. She was glad she gave the guy the money, because she was probably the only person he would be able to get it from. He probably just grabbed some knife from his house to use; he wasn't really planning on mugging people for a living. Just to get a few extra bucks.

Blossom picked it up. It was actually very clean; any gunk on it had come from Blossom's raincoat more than anything else. The whole thing was a solid piece of steel, and definitely could have hurt somebody. But the thing was, it never had hurt anybody. Neither had that guy, probably. Heck, Blossom couldn't even call him a mugger in her _mind_.

Blossom remembered that she was making hot chocolate. Or was it hot cocoa? It didn't really matter, because she couldn't find the power for either. Was there even a difference? She threw the knife onto her couch – that might prove to be a pain in the ass, later – and put up the mug and the milk.

So hot cocoa was out. Now what? Nothing. Blossom supposed she should sleep. She had to go to work tomorrow, after all. It was her first day, too, for a very ironic job. The Mayor's secretary. Mrs. Bellum's secretary. Working for the person she should have been.

Oh, well. At least she _had_ a job, and her boss was a person who liked her. What more could she ask for? At work, that is. What more could she ask for at work?

Blossom walked over to her couch, for some reason. Why she did was beyond her. It would have made sense to go to the bathroom to shower or brush her teeth, or to her room to change into dry clothes and sleep. But she went to her couch instead. She made sure to move that knife out of the way before sitting down.

Blossom was immediately overcome by a wall of exhaustion when her body fell into the plush cloth of the couch. She hadn't paid much attention to it the whole day, but she was more tired than she thought she was. Visiting you dad and your sister in two of the worst places you could find them in… it's very draining. It's much easier to sleep it off than to keep yourself awake worrying uselessly about it.

Then Blossom did something she almost never did. Usually, she would get all ready for bed, and be nice and clean when she climbed into her bed. However, this night was different, mostly because it was the end of an especially stressful day and the start of another one. She just slumped over sideways – thank God she had knocked that knife off of the couch beforehand – and fell asleep right there on the couch. Damp – well, now dry funeral clothes and all.

Blossom didn't start dreaming about the Professor, or Buttercup, or Bubbles, or anything else depressing. She was too tired too. She just thought about that knife, and how clean it was. That is, until her raincoat made it look dirty.


	6. Chapter 6 (Bubbles)

"Your turn, Sara." Phillip turned groggily onto his side and muffled his ears with the blankets. Little Paul was crying again.

Bubbles was very sleepy, but smiled at Phillip. "Ok, I will." She stuck her feet out of bed first, and then the rest of her body, and walked over a few feet to the crib.

Paul's little face was twisted up from crying. It was adorable, yet at the same time, Bubbles couldn't bear it. She lifted her only child ever so gently, and nuzzled his face as she rocked him back and forth in her arms. His cries began dying down as she rocked him back and forth, back and forth…

Soon enough, Paul Phillip Grey was sound asleep again. Bubbles's face shined so brightly at her son that it nearly woke him up. Well, not Bubbles's face anymore. It was Sara Grey's face. And Sara Grey had nothing to do with Bubbles at all; they had nothing in common except a body.

For one thing, Sara Grey didn't live in Pokey Oaks, or any other suburb of Townsville, for that matter. Sara Grey had no family other than her husband Phillip Grey and her son Paul Grey. Sara Grey was a normal, stay-at-home mom, who looked after the child and the suburban house while Phillip went to work in the city.

And there wasn't a drop of Chemical X for hundreds of miles in any direction from Sara Grey. Except, of course, inside of Sara Grey herself.

But besides that, it was all behind her. She only had to think about happy things now. Happy, normal things that didn't involve monsters or violence or… lasers. Things like a husband who loved her, and a little child who loved her more. Normal things.

Sara Grey laid her son down back in his crib. She tucked the blanket in around him. Such a little angel, he was. After a while, she stopped staring at him and made her way over to her own bed again. She needed sleep as much as the next person, after all.

And then, when Sara Grey was almost back to being under the covers, she rather abruptly banged her shin on the wood frame of the bed. Her left shin.

Now, for most people, it would be pretty painful to be hit on the leg like that, but after a lot of hissing breaths, ice if needed, and perhaps a few expletives, everything would return to normal. And indeed, it was painful to Sara Grey. But it wasn't the type of pain a normal person would have felt, because to Bubbles, it felt like the entire left half of her body was being seared off.

It took all the strength Bubbles could muster not to scream. Or even make a noise, for that matter. Her left side, starting from the site of impact, began glowing light blue, and the pain spread to the same areas that were being lit up.

_Not now, Sara, _Bubbles thought to herself._ You can't do this now._

Bubbles clenched her teeth and gripped the mattress furiously. She couldn't make a sound. Not that she wasn't physically capable of doing so. But she couldn't make a sound, so she didn't stomp the ground as the amazingly brilliant light – and the accompanying burning sensation – spread up her leg, up her torso, and into her left arm.

_No, Sara. No. This isn't a thing that happens. Calm down. This isn't a thing that happens. Calm down. _

"Sara, could you please turn off the light?" Phillip mumbled, still on his side and, thankfully, facing the other way.

_This doesn't happen. It's not a problem. Ever. Just calm down, Sara. Calm down. You're not hurt._

The glow stopped spreading, and started fading.

_See? Just calm down. You're not hurt. You're perfectly safe, Sara. No one will hurt you here._

The glow was dimming quickly now, and what was searing pain devolved into a dull throb in the left half of her body.

"Thank you, Sara," Phillip mumbled again before drifting off into sleep.

And then it was over. Sara sank onto the side of the bed and took a few breaths. Very inconsistent breaths, too – short, puffy ones to deep ones that almost made her lungs tickle. It was over. She could go back to sleep, and back to being Sara Grey, wife and mother. That little episode was over. She still felt a little tingly from the ordeal, but that was resolved with a small, short, but very unladylike burp. It tasted of an unsavory mix of sugar and petroleum.

In reality, though, it tasted of an unsavory mix of sugar and Chemical X.


	7. Chapter 7 (Buttercup)

_"Bubbles! Go now!" Buttercup screamed as the creature loomed over her. She zoomed past one if its black, leathery legs with her arm held out and snapped it in half._

_ Bubbles didn't move. She was hovering in the air about ten feet higher than the monster and about fifty feet away, and holding onto the Mayor's arm. The rest of his body wasn't there. Just his arm._

_ "Bubbles! Come now!" Buttercup tried to knock out the other leg, the one Bubbles should have hit, but it was too late to try and destabilize the monster. The first leg had already reformed, and was stepping on things again. As Buttercup dodged and weaved through the jungle of legs underneath the monster, she remembered that she had another sister. "Blossom! Help me out!"_

_ "Okay…" She was a little more keen to move than Bubbles, but not by much. Blossom flew slowly, and kept staring at the monster leg shaped hole that was punched through Mojo Jojo's torso. It definitely wasn't Mojo' s monster._

_ Buttercup escaped from underneath the creature at just the right time as to not barrel head first into Blossom. Buttercup was pretty pissed off, more at the monster than at her sisters. They had been fighting the same creature for hours, and they were losing. It was a screwed up situation, and Blossom wasn't helping. "What the heck is your problem, Blossom? It's just another freaking monster, so fight it!"_

_ Blossom stared at Buttercup with huge, hollow eyes. "But we've already failed. The Mayor…"_

_ "Screw the Mayor, we've got a monster to fight!" Buttercup zipped as fast as she could to Bubbles and knock the Mayor's arm out of hers._

_ "Buttercup!" Bubbles cried in horror. It must've looked insensitive to do that._

_ "Go now!" Buttercup kind of grabbed her arm and threw her in the direction of the monster. _

"_Not so hard!" Bubbles yelled back at her. It was a horrible thing to do, to push Bubbles like that, but Blossom wasn't moving, and something had to be done._

_ Something had to be done, but that something wasn't what actually happened._

_ After hurling Bubbles, Buttercup spun around and shot a very angry, violent, hate-filled laser at the monster. Way too much of a laser, actually. A lot stronger than was necessary._

_Only, it didn't hit the monster. It hit Bubbles._

_ It hit her on the left side. It shouldn't have been such a big deal, because Buttercup accidentally hit Bubbles or Blossom with some thing or the other every now and then, and they were always fine. But Bubbles screamed. It was a way over the top, that laser beam. Way too strong. She screamed and cried, and then she looked at Buttercup…_

Buttercup woke up in the middle of the night panting her ass off. At least, it felt like the middle of the night. There were no windows in this new room, or even a clock, but it felt like the middle of the night. All the lights were off, anyways, except for a small nightlight built into the wall and covered with a thick sheet of semi-clear plastic.

Anyways, Buttercup was panting like a dog and sweating like a pig. All her clothes were sticky from the cold sweat. She ripped the sheets off – white sheets, by the way – and sat upright. It felt like the pillow was attached to her face, and she brought her hand to remove it.

She didn't though, because it was a bandage. For her ear, probably. Buttercup reached her hand down her leg and felt another bandage. She supposed her burns were treated and all. Sometimes those nurse people were so nice, whenever they weren't being complete assholes.

She kind of wanted to take them off, though, because they were all sweaty inside. What a dream. Or what a nightmare. Actually, what a memory. It knocked the wind out of her, to think about it. That's the type of memory it was. The type you hate to remember, but can't forget, yet need to remember so that you don't forget.

Buttercup shook her head to get the thought out. There was no monster or anything right now. Blossom was safe now. She was probably sleeping right now. Bubbles… was probably safe also. Buttercup had no idea where the hell Bubbles was, but she told herself that Bubbles was probably safe. And Buttercup was safe and sound in some hospital, right?

No. Yes, she was in a hospital, but no, she was not safe. At least, she wouldn't be safe in the future. It was a matter of fact. She had signed away her soul to Him for what were essentially peanuts. Buttercup's heart sank as she remembered what had made her burn herself on candlewax in the first place.

She was technically a Satanist. Technically. God, would Townsville get a kick out of that. A Powerpuff Girl, a goddamn Satanist. It was so screwed up. She was literally going to burn in hell after she died for screwing up so badly. Spend the rest of eternity with Him. And it was all her fault. Maybe it was a good thing she was in a mental hospital.

Then Buttercup thought of something else. It was on the same train of thought, but the train had gone off the rails. Her soul belonged to Him now. He wouldn't just get it after she died; he had it _now_. Like, right now. He could probably squish it in his creepy claw hands if he wanted to. Dread started bubbling up inside of Buttercup like air would from a tar pit. He had her freaking _soul_. He could do whatever the hell he wanted with it. Cut it, smash it, burn it, shove it up his skirt…

Buttercup started panicking. She had never actually considered what selling her soul meant. It was spur of the moment panic when she had done it years ago, but now she could think about it. And think she did. Now that she belonged to Him, he could control everything about her. Stab needles into her soul and cause her pain, soak it in rum to make her depressed, stick a battery in it and make her hyper… he could do anything. He could probably control her thoughts, too. Was he making her think all this up?

Buttercup sprang out of her bed and for the moment stood motionless next to it. He was making her think all this, wasn't he? Obviously, then, he wanted her to figure everything out, and then freak about it. He wanted her to picture Him simultaneously caressing and mutilating her soul. He wanted her to visualize him literally shitting on her life. But Buttercup couldn't help it, naturally, because it was Him that was directing her thoughts.

Buttercup supposed it was Him that made her _do _things, too. Like suddenly bolting out of the infirmary and racing down the hallways at top speed. Like screaming at the top of your voice, "I need the peppers!" Like ruthlessly (and though Buttercup didn't like to admit it, with a bit of Chemical X) kicking down random people's doors and ruffing up their stuff to find the peppers. Like punching the freaking nurse people with full force in the face, and making them bleed and cry just to keep looking for the peppers. Like fighting until the tranquilizer reached the tips of her fingertips.

Even when she stopped moving, Buttercup couldn't get Him out of her head. She wanted to so badly, but she couldn't. She was panicking too much. She was going to be like this forever. As far as Buttercup was concerned, Hell came early.


	8. Chapter 8 (Blossom)

"_Tell us what you're up to, Mojo!" Blossom held him up by the collar and gave him another sound punch across the face. "I know you're hiding something!" The monster rampaged on behind her, as it had been for hours. Buttercup was fighting, and Bubbles… well, she wasn't. She was holding the mayor's arm. Not the rest of his body. Just his arm. But Blossom wasn't holding a dead guy yet; she had in her grip a villain, who she was sure was the mastermind behind this whole debacle. _

"_No, no, don't hit me!" Mojo pleaded as Blossom prepared for another punch. "Why would you think this has anything to do with me? Monsters attack Townsville all the time, and _they_ aren't my fault!"_

_Damn it. He made sense. But Blossom knew something was up, because he was uncharacteristically straightforward. Blossom set floated down to street level, but kept her hand firm on Mojo. "Then why were you riding it?"_

"_I wasn't riding it! It grabbed me, just like you are now!"_

_Something was still fishy. Mojo should have been repetitive. He should have been reiterating his thoughts, which is to say that he would think of something and then say it, and then proceed to say it again in a wording that was different than the original wording, such that the meaning remains essentially unchanged. He was never simple, sensible, or linear in thought. Ever._

_While Blossom was lost in thought, Mojo escaped from her grip. He made a run for it, and Blossom was about to chase after – but she didn't have to. With one fell swoop, the monster Buttercup was fighting stepped with its massive leg right through Mojo. Not on Mojo – _through_ Mojo. When the leg lifted up again, what was left on the street was the carcass of the late and not very great Mojo Jojo, with a perfect hole punched through the center._

_Sure, Mojo was a bad guy, but Blossom still felt horrible when he actually died. He wasn't just beat up and put in jail – he _died_. He was dead, deceased, no longer living, due to the fact that there was a hole in his body that made it impossible for him to live. As Blossom stared at the body, she became aware of a faint, distant, but steady ringing._

Blossom's eyes shot open, and her heart sank a little. The memories she just had of the Incident were a dream, but last night… none of that was. She had actually fallen asleep on a couch. She had actually not showered or changed clothes. She had actually taken that guy's knife and kept it in her living room. And now, who knew how long her alarm clock had been ringing, just itching to be shut off by a prompt and responsible young adult?

Well, what it got was a panicked and filthy one. Blossom was not about to be late to her first day of work just because her father died and sister yelled and she herself got mugged the night before. No excuses. She shot into her bedroom and slammed the whining alarm clock. Oh God, it was almost eight thirty. Work started at nine. Blossom zipped into the bathroom for a quick shower and brushed her teeth and skipped breakfast and changed her clothes all in one fell swoop. She checked the time. 8:40. She could make it if she just sped up. She picked up her briefcase – yes, she bought an actual briefcase – and mindlessly checked its contents. All the paperwork for her first day was there. The lunch she had packed yesterday before the funeral was in the fridge, and Blossom threw that in the briefcase too. She was running out of time. Before slamming the thing shut, she casually dropped in the knife on her living room floor. What use it would do at work as a secretary, Blossom had no idea, but she wasn't focused on that at the moment.

With a burst of speed that would have made Hermes jealous, Blossom raced out of her apartment and into the streets of Townsville. Luckily, she lived incredibly close to Town Hall; so close, in fact, that it would have taken longer to hail a cab or ride the subway than to just run there at the breakneck pace she was currently moving at.

Blossom ran almost as fast as she could, a little too fast even. Maybe so fast that it looked like she was on Chemical X or something. Blossom only slowed down when she realized that she was keeping up with the cars on the road, and people were staring at her. As her sprint slowed to a jog and then a crawl in front of city hall, Blossom turned around. That was a mistake.

In a straight line running in the direction of her apartment was a cleared path, and angry and stunned people were on either side of it. There was a hot dog vendor laying on top his stand, a kid who had fallen backwards and scraped his knee on the sidewalk, a mother clutching for dear life the infant that had almost been ripped out of her hands. One by one, the citizens of Townsville unfroze and turned seething glares directly at Blossom.

Oops. She used a bit too much Chemical X, didn't she? Just a bit? Blossom suddenly broke out of her trance and entered the building. Outside the clear glass doors, Blossom could see the inklings of a mob beginning to form. She removed herself from the front doors immediately and clocked in. 8:56. That was a close call for her first day. Probably not the best first impression.

That, and the people brewing just outside of Town Hall. Thankfully, Blossom saw that the mass of people on the street remained just that: a crowd. It wasn't an organized and oriented mob, as far as she could tell. But it was still a frightening possibility.

Blossom kept thinking about the mob on the slow elevator ride up to the proper floor. Now that she had some time to think, the gravity of her screw up really hit her. She used Chemical X, an illegal substance, in _public_. The last thing Townsville wanted to see, even to this day, was Chemical X. In their eyes, she was a criminal. It didn't matter that she needed the stuff to keep her alive; displaying it could very well get her jailed, or sued at the very least.

At least she had made it to work of time. When Blossom entered the mayor's office, Mrs. Bellum greeted Blossom with what was presumably a great smile – Mrs. Bellum's grand red hair usually covered her face.

"On time, Blossom, as I knew I could expect from you!" It was nine o'clock on the dot. "Just the responsible young woman I need to help me run a city."

"Well, thanks, Mrs. Bellum. I try," Blossom said awkwardly. After waking up late and almost inciting a mob, she didn't exactly feel very responsible.

"Listen, Blossom," Mrs. Bellum began rather suddenly. "I need to talk to you in private. May I?"

"Of course." Blossom was a little confused. They were already alone in the office, after all. She could have just started talking.

Mrs. Bellum reached into a drawer on her desk and pulled out one of those things you hang on a doorknob. It read 'Do Not Disturb.' "Could you please hang this on the door, and then come have a seat?"

"Of course, Mrs. Bellum." Blossom put her briefcase on the floor and accepted the sign, hung it on the outside of the door, and took a seat in exactly that order. At least she could do that much without oversleeping or causing a riot.

"Blossom," Mrs. Bellum began cautiously, "you aren't still upset about the election, are you?"

"The election?" Blossom admitted to herself that she would still have liked to be the actual mayor of Townsville, but knew she would be the most unpopular mayor since Jack Jerkstein, the mayor about fifty years ago who was sued on charges of sexual harassment by a coworker, but was found not guilty. Yes, Blossom did that research, and yes, she would be _that_ unpopular. But Blossom would still like being the mayor. She couldn't bring herself to tell Mrs. Bellum that, technically, she wanted to replace her. "No, I'm over it. You're the better mayor Townsville needs, and I don't really want to be mayor anyways."

"Don't call the grapes sour just because you can't reach them, Blossom. I know you want to be the mayor. Or, at least, you wanted to be when you were running for the office." Mrs. Bellum saw right through Blossom. "Do you know why you want to be mayor, Blossom?"

"Why?" Blossom mistakenly thought that the question was rhetorical.

Mrs. Bellum put her hands on her desk and interlocked her fingers. "I was hoping that you would be able to answer that for yourself, Blossom. Do you know why?"

To hell with mess-ups, Blossom thought. There's no way she could get in trouble for telling the truth, or at least what she thought was the truth. "I want to prove myself, Mrs. Bellum. To you, and to Buttercup, and to Townsville. I couldn't even properly lead my own two sisters when…" The thing about the Incident was, people rarely used the term 'The Incident' in everyday speech. "Well, you know when. I want to prove to everyone that I can lead, and that I can lead well."

From the shifting of Mrs. Bellum's hair, Blossom guessed that she was lifting an eyebrow. "Are you sure about that, Blossom? You're proving yourself to me? Or to you yourself?" Even when Blossom wasn't hiding something, Mrs. Bellum saw right through her.

"Well, that makes me sound selfish. The mayor should be someone who cares about Townsville…" Blossom would have been looking Mrs. Bellum in the eyes is she could see them. "But I care about Townsville, don't I?"

"I can't answer that question for you, Blossom. Only you can. But the important thing is, whether you are mayor or secretary, whether you are passing laws or answering phone calls, you are doing it for the love of your city, and not for your love of yourself."

Blossom had no response. It might have looked sort of unprofessional and a little rude to just sit there and not say anything, except that Blossom was doing the exact opposite of ignoring Mrs. Bellum. Funny, Blossom thought, that the reactions to being heavily impacted by a sentence and missing it completely are the same.

Mrs. Bellum changed her tone, which had been a little depressing until now. "But I've known you for a long time, Blossom, and I have faith in you. I know that you will achieve great things if you are willing to sacrifice your pride for it. You are very young, Blossom; you have plenty of time to run for mayor again. In the meantime, you can serve your city in the best method currently possible for you. And, Blossom?"

"Yes, Mrs. Bellum?"

"I'm not just going to have you in the side office answering phone calls and scheduling lunch meetings all day. Sure, that's what a secretary does, but I can do some of that. I want you to help me with being mayor – an assistant, if you will." She paused for dramatic effect, and it worked. "If fact, Blossom, I trust you so much, that your first assignment is something that would traditionally be done by the mayor himself." She reached for a manila file folder with a few official looking documents inside. "I need you to run over to the Townsville jail and do a quick report on the conditions there. Don't worry about doing it correctly; the form is pretty straightforward, and the chief of police should be there to help you out, since it's your first day. Is that okay with you?"

Blossom took the manila folder from Mrs. Bellum. "It's a lot more than okay, Mrs. Bellum – I don't know what to say." Was this really happening? It was Blossom's first day, and she was already promoted to the closest position to mayor she had ever been in. It was stunning, and left Blossom speechless for the second time.

Again, Blossom guessed that Mrs. Bellum was smiling. "A simple 'thank you' would be nice," she laughed.

"Thank you, Mrs. Bellum. I'll get right on it." Blossom slipped the papers into her briefcase, where, thank God, her dry lunch hadn't damaged any of the actual papers. Blossom caught a glimpse of the knife before she closed the case and fastened the latches.

"And remember, Blossom," Mrs. Bellum called as Blossom left to run her first errand as the unofficial mayor's assistant, "You're not doing this for me or you, but for the people of Townsville."

The momentary updraft of Blossom's feelings didn't last too long after she left Mrs. Bellum's office. By the time she was in the elevator, Blossom had realized with dread that she had abused Chemical X just that very morning, and now she was about to inspect the very cells that could house her in the near future.


	9. Chapter 9 (Bubbles)

Sara casually sipped her coffee and unfolded the wad of newspaper before her. Her son was napping in the other room, and Phillip had left for work hours earlier. Sara knew that she would have to make a small trip to the grocery store before Phillip got home (they were out of bread and milk), but she figured she would do that after lunch. For now, it would be best to relax while Paul was asleep.

It was too early for lunch, but too late for a proper breakfast, so Sara just had her coffee. Usually, one drinks their morning coffee and reads the paper very early, right when he or she wakes up. However, there was too much of a rush in the morning, as Sara made breakfast for Phillip every day and, if he was awake, took care of Paul. Things were much calmer by 9:30 a.m. Calm enough to read the paper and drink coffee and relax at the kitchen table.

Someone who had known Sara in her childhood wouldn't have expected her to be the type to read the paper. Of course, no one knew _Sara_ as a child… but then again, no one knew Bubbles as an adult. In any case, Sara had developed a love of reading later in life. In the morning she read the paper, in the afternoon she immersed herself in a novel, and the evenings were often spent admiring poetry.

Reading was an acquired taste for Sara. For one thing, it was _Sara_ who enjoyed reading, not Bubbles. Primarily, though, Sara read to get lost in other worlds. Worlds other than her own past. Novels had tales set in different places and different times, and things could occur without consequences in the reader's actual life; everything that happened, no matter how wild, was contained within two planks of card. Poetry was so filled with structure and abstraction that any ideas it conveyed were delivered in its purest form, without the social context of the reader present to muddy it up.

The newspaper was a little different in that there was risk involved. Sure, the vast majority of stories were just that - little snippets out of the lives of either the incredibly famous or the incredibly unknown, and nothing more. She could get lost in the lives of others. But nearly every character mentioned was a real person, who had a real mother and a real father and lived in some real place on the real planet. And there was a chance that said character was related to you personally.

That's the risk that Bubbles took when she read the paper. On this particular day, it was a horrible idea. As she skimmed the front page, something caught her attention. It wasn't the main headline by a long shot, but there was a little box that read:

_America's Greatest Scientist Dies at Age 64 (page 5A)_

Bubbles normally wouldn't have thought much of it, but there was a picture of the Professor right next to the caption. Professor Utonium. Bubbles's heart sank, and she was disgusted that her heart sank. That man wasn't her father, Bubbles told herself. Sending your five-year-old to go fight monsters and shoot lasers? It sounded on the surface like the type of game a five-year-old would make believe, but when it happened in real life… it was obscene. She had battled Him, for crying out loud, before she could even ride a bike. Sometimes, Bubbles seriously questioned how a Professor who claimed to love his daughters so much could put them in so much danger.

And they weren't even his daughters; they were his creations. Test tube babies. Lab experiments. At least as Sara Grey, Bubbles could pretend to have been born and not… formulated. She was a person, not a synthetic crime-fighting thing.

However, reading that the Professor was dead still knocked the wind out of Bubbles. No matter how much Bubbles denied it, the Professor had genuinely cared about her and her sisters. As if they were actual daughters. He kept them safe – mostly from themselves, arguably – and was making the ultimate sacrifice by putting the well-being of the people of Townsville ahead of his own. Bubbles knew that, which is why she was crying.

If she wanted to run away, she had to forget everything about her past. Whatever she couldn't forget, she had to hate. She didn't forget the Professor, so she had to hate him. She had to hate him, and Blossom, and Buttercup, and Mrs. Bellum, and Ms. K… Bubbles blanked on her kindergarten teacher's name. Good. Sara was making progress, then.

Sara wiped the tears from her eyes and tried not to produce anymore. She didn't bother reading the article itself, just in case there were reminders about her old life in Townsville in there. Bubbles just had to forget that, and start thinking about Paul, who had just woken up in the other room and started to cry.

As Sara Grey put down her newspaper and walked to her son, Bubbles defeatedly murmured to herself. "Goodbye, Professor."


	10. Chapter 10 (Blossom)

The cab ride to the Townsville jail was rather uneventful, as far as Blossom was concerned, but it was very noisy. The seat squeaked every time the cab hit a bump, the engine groaned whenever the accelerator was pressed, and in the distance Blossom could hear the firing of missiles. The military was fighting back a monster on the other side of Townsville, Blossom assumed. In the streets, not a soul was phased by the ruckus, because the Townsville Municipal Guard had never let a monster inflict more than a few thousand dollars of damage to the city in its entire existence. That was more than could be said of the former Powerpuff Girls, even in their glory days.

Though the cab ride was bland, it wasn't all too boring, because it was very short. In fact, Blossom probably could have saved herself a few bucks and walked to the jail. She would have to be out of her damn mind to expose herself in the streets of Townsville so soon after her screw-up that morning, but she could have.

Blossom paid the driver, entered the jail, and asked to see the chief of police in an unremarkable fashion. She had never thought about who the chief of police was, though, until she read the unexpected name on his nametag upon his arrival.

"Mitch?" Blossom squinted to make sure she was reading the nametag right. She was. "Mitch Mitchelson? It's really you?" God, she hadn't seen or thought about him in ages. He was tall and burly and in uniform, with calloused hands and a gruff but well groomed beard.

"Yes, ma'am," he replied in a deep voice with the tip of his nonexistent hat. "And what may I do for you, Ms…" Now it was his turn to squint. "Blossom?"

Blossom had to smile a little; sure, Mitch had been a jerk in kindergarten, but they were _five years old_ then, for crying out loud. Just little kids. Besides, there wasn't a hint of nastiness in the way he was acting now. "I'm her, the same Blossom you went to school with."

For a split second, it looked like to Blossom that Mitch was going to move in for a friendly hug, but instead she found her hand firmly shaking his. "Blossom! Long time, no see! What's it been, like, twenty years? I mean, I hear about you in the news sometimes, but I haven't actually met you in person, have I? How are things?"

"Fine, just fine." When someone asks you how you're doing, they rarely want to know your life story. Usually, they just ask out of politeness, as a common courtesy. "How about you?"

"Great here too." Mitch paused, and continued with a bit of tension. "So… what are you doing here? In jail… did Buttercup-"

"No, no," Blossom quickly assured him, "nothing like that." The pressure relieved instantly. "I'm just running an errand for Mrs. Bellum about cell quality reports. I have the paperwork, and she said you'd help me out with it."

Mitch raised an eyebrow. "She sent you over?" he asked as Blossom unlatched her briefcase. "I thought the mayor was supposed to come for herself. You lost the election, didn't you?"

"Yeah." Blossom couldn't help but feel a little indignant. She tried to hide it, but Mitch caught on.

"Oh, sorry, Blossom. I didn't mean it like that-"

"It's fine. I'm her assistant, and she told me to come." Blossom freed herself from the need to say more by handing Mitch the documents. He took them in his giant hands and skimmed them.

"Okay, Blossom," he tilted the forms so that Blossom could see where he was pointing. "This is a pretty standard form. You just have to check off if each of these three randomly selected cells meets city specs. Just go through the list: proper bed, proper toilet, sanitation, meal frequency and content. Standard stuff. I just need to walk you around, so you know where each cell is. Should we start?"

Blossom closed her briefcase and set herself up to take notes. "Of course. The first one is Cell 106."

"Let's go, then."

It had been a while since Blossom had to know the layout of the jail. She still sort of remembered the floor plan. However, she couldn't just bust through the ceiling at just the right place this time, and so followed Mitch through the cement-walled hallways.

Blossom broke the awkward silence with a genuine question. "So, Mitch, how'd you get to be chief of police?"

Mitch chuckled a little bit, in a kind way. "Well, Blossom, it wasn't easy. You know, after kindergarten, and elementary and middle school, my high school years weren't all too glorious. I was drinking, smoking, among… other things, that I don't think I should mention. I never graduated high school, technically. But then, right around my eighteenth birthday, I turned my life around. I went cold turkey on all drugs and alcohol, and made it a point to get into a police academy. I learned discipline there and… well, look at me now!"

Hmm. Who would have thought? "What made you turn your life around?"

Blossom could have sworn that she saw Mitch blush. "That's a little too personal." He put his hand on the back of his neck. "I don't even like to admit it to myself, sometimes. But hey, it worked."

"I understand. That's great though, that you brought yourself up like that." Blossom was walking to the left of and behind Mitch, so she couldn't see his face. You get used to that, being around Mrs. Bellum as often as Blossom was. She could look in the general direction of his face, so she did.

Mitch asked the same question in reverse, half out of politeness, and half to avoid another awkward silence. "Mrs. Bellum hired you as her assistant, then?"

"Well, as a secretary, technically. But I think she promoted me to assistant not even an hour ago, for no reason at all."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that." Mitch looked back at Blossom, and Blossom looked up at Mitch at the same time. "Mrs. Bellum always has a reason. She's really smart about that sort of thing."

Blossom would have had to reply if they weren't already at Cell 106. There wasn't actually anybody inside the cell, so the inspection was going to be pretty easy. Blossom let Mitch open the gate for her and went through the list.

"You can skip all the stuff about meals and everything," Mitch clarified before Blossom even got to that part on the checklist. "Just make sure to say the cell is uninhabited."

"Okay." Blossom continued silently inspecting the cell. It looked like the cell had been in use recently, but was cleaned up after its last occupant was released. It wasn't cleaned up very well, though. There was gunk around and on the toilet, the bed stank of urine, and a rat or two had definitely crossed Blossom's path during the inspection. Not the best first impression, in shorter words. She checked the proper boxes and left Cell 106 without a word.

"What's next?" Mitch asked as he closed the cell gate behind Blossom.

Blossom turned to the next form. "Cell 109." She picked up her briefcase, which she had left leaning against the wall outside the cell, and walked with Mitch three cells down the same hallway.

"Hmm. They usually don't pick cells so close to each other." Mitch unlocked the gate and let Blossom in.

It was the same story, unsurprisingly, as the last cell. It was vacant – Blossom noticed, later, that all the cells in the 100s hallway were empty – and rather unclean. Mitch asked the same question he did last time when she was done inspecting.

"Cell 213 is the last one." Blossom picked up her briefcase again.

"Let's go, then. That's all the way over in the other hallway." Mitch made his way to the 200s hallway. Blossom followed him.

"How come both of those cells are empty?" Blossom asked Mitch, because neither of them wanted to prolong the silence that had grown while Blossom was inspecting Cells 106 and 109. She actually did want to know, though, because she found it strange.

"All of the most hardened criminals stay in the 100s hallway." Mitch stared straight ahead, and walked a little faster. "About a week ago, a motion was passed to send them all to a state prison to serve the rest of their terms. Most of them were for life, anyways."

Blossom vaguely remembered seeing that in the news a few days ago. "Did you pass that motion?" He was the chief of police.

Mitch expelled a heavy sigh. "I can't say I did anything useful to stop it." Then, he stopped abruptly in his tracks, and swiveled around to look Blossom straight in the eyes. Blossom, caught off guard, almost ran straight into him, but caught herself in time. "I really didn't want those people to be sent off Blossom. Those people are not like the monsters that Townsville has to fight off every day, Blossom. Those people are _people_. People, just like you and me, that need to have their lives set straight again. Not condemned to slowly wither away behind bars, left to steep in their own sense of guilt or hatred for years on end. They-"

Blossom realized that her dropped jaw had shanked Mitch's rant in the back.

Mitch turned around again in embarrassment and began walking. "Sorry, I shouldn't have said that." He tried to mutter to himself, but was still audible. "I'm the chief of the goddamn _police_. I'm the reason those bastards even got sent to jail. Besides, she doesn't want to hear that from a-"

"Wait, Mitch. It's fine." Blossom stumbled forwards and grabbed his arm. She wasn't planning on actually grabbing his arm, just tapping it, but she had leapt forwards so quickly that she something to keep her from face-planting on the cement floor. "I didn't mean to gape like that," Blossom continued when Mitch was forced to stop walking. "I just wasn't expecting it, that's all. But I still value your opinion."

Mitch probably raised an eyebrow. Blossom couldn't tell; he still had his back to her. "Really? Because until a few minutes ago, you had no clue that I was even still in Townsville."

It finally struck Blossom just how easy it was to talk with Mitch. He was right; she didn't even consider his existence until she entered the jail. Sure, in the few times they had spoken, it was to avoid an awkward silence. But the things they said… they were honest things, weren't they? Not just small talk about the weather. And most importantly, the openness was more on Mitch's part than on Blossom's.

"Well, Cell 213 is right down the corner." Mitch pointed to indicate his desire to move onwards. "Let's go."

Blossom realized that she was still grabbing his arm, and quickly jerked her hand away from his. Maybe she had held on a little too long. "Yes, let's." They made their way to the cell.

This cell was a little different than the last two, because there was an actual person inside. He was green in the face and hunched over in a corner, staring at nothing in particular.

"Here, stand back," Mitch instructed Blossom. "This one's a dangerous one. He was about to be moved into the 100s hallway, but just barely missed the cutoff. There's a reason he's all alone in that cell." He called to the man in the cell before unlocking it. "Mr. Gribberish, I am about to enter your cell with a friend. You are to remain seated the whole time. Is this clear?"

The man spat with the tongue that was already hanging out of his mouth.

"Stay close to me," Mitch said as he opened the cell door cautiously. The man showed no intention of moving, so Mitch stood in front of him and motioned for Blossom to come in.

Blossom checked the same things she had in the other two cells, except she kept flicking her eyes to the convict. Gribberish… Blossom thought about the Gangreen Gang for the first time in years. That man was Grubber, wasn't he? He certainly looked and acted the part. And he was in jail. Blossom came up to Mitch at what in the other cells had been the end of her inspection.

"How do I ask him about meals and all? He'll just respond with spit."

Mitch looked back at Blossom. "How do you know?"

"Same way you do. I had to teach Grubber here a lesson or two, back before-"

"Right, right," Mitch stopped Blossom from saying 'the Incident.' Nobody used the term outright if they didn't have to. "Well, try anyways, for formality's sake. Make the legal system happy. Just write that the responses were unintelligible."

"Okay…" Blossom trusted that Mitch knew what he was doing. She stood beside Mitch, so Grubber could see her. "I have a few questions for you, Grubber."

Mitch bumped Blossom's arm. "Call him Mr. Gribberish. It's more professional."

Blossom glanced at Mitch, who kept his gaze steadfast on Grubber. Blossom was quick to look back at the paper and begin reading out loud. "Mr. Gribberish, do you receive three meals per day at this facility?"

Spit.

"Do you believe that the meals you receive are of adequate nutritional quality?"

Spit.

"Do you believe that the meals you receive are reflective of the choices you made that brought you here?" Who the hell came up with these questions? They were terrible.

Grubber didn't spit this time, but shook his head no. That's how terrible the question was.

"Well, Mr. Gribberish, I that's all I have for you. Good day."

Two spits, as if he was trying to say "good day" back.

Blossom left Cell 213 first, followed by a Mitch who kept an eye on Grubber until the cell door was locked once again. He walked her back wordlessly to the front of the jail, where they had originally met.

"Is that it?" Blossom clarified, so as to not leave a form unfilled or something.

"That's it." Mitch put on a smile as wide as the one he had first greeted her with. "Just give those to Mrs. Bellum. I have to go back to the police station, so the jailer can go back to work."

There was an awkward pause. There was a shared hatred between Mitch and Blossom of the awkward pause. "Listen, Mitch," Blossom began in an equally awkward attempt to fill the silence, "about what you said earlier-"

"Don't mention it." Mitch leaned in a little with a smile and whispered in only a half joking voice, "Seriously, don't mention it. I would kind of like to keep my job." He pulled back to normal position. "Well, Blossom, hope I'll see you around."

Blossom slipped the forms into her briefcase. "Yeah, I'll see you around." Involuntarily, "Maybe we can have lunch sometime" slipped out of her mouth immediately afterwards.

Blossom was as red in the face as she was in the eyes, but Mitch just had a good-natured, hearty laugh about it. "Yeah, maybe we can. Until then, Blossom."

"Until then." Blossom left the jail with those as her last words. She hailed another cab, still not wanting to risk being mobbed in the streets of Townsville, and rode back to Town Hall.

Lost in thought on the way there, she noticed that Mitch had not once mentioned her screw-up that morning. Surely he had seen or heard of it, because he was pretty much there, but he never mentioned it. What he had mentioned, though, were his innermost thoughts on incarceration.

Though the Mitch Mitchelson of the past had been a pest at best and a curse at worst, Blossom decided that she liked the man he had become.

She wished it was that easy to decide whether or not she agreed with his opinions.


	11. Chapter 11 (Buttercup)

_It was about three days before the worst day of Buttercup's life. Of course, she didn't know that at the time. But it was._

_ Buttercup and Bubbles were training together. The Professor and Blossom were on the other side of the safety glass panel, and the training room simulator had conjured up a wrestling ring for Bubbles and Buttercup to fight in. A buzzer sounded, and the Professor said to go._

_ Bubbles fought back for a while. Really well, actually, as far as Bubbles went. Buttercup was almost getting tired. She punched Bubbles in the back, and Bubbles got her up the ass with a laser. With a reeling tingling sensation, Buttercup squealed in surprise and then spun around to get Bubbles back._

_ "Is that all you got, chump?" Buttercup shot towards Bubbles with her fists outstretched._

_ "Nope!" Bubbles dodged the punch, and threw in one of her own before zipping away to a different corner of the ring and shooting Buttercup in the ass again. And she laughed about it._

_ Buttercup should have been laughing too, because they were just practicing, and it was all in good fun. But lately, she had felt off her game, and this only served to validate that. So instead, Buttercup was a little pissed off. It didn't help that Bubbles was sticking her tongue out when Buttercup turned to face her again._

_There were a few rules that they all stuck to while training, to keep it safe. If they used lasers, for example, they had to make them weak, and only hit the other person from the neck down. If they punched each other, it couldn't be too hard, or in the face._

_ Buttercup broke that last rule. She flung herself as fast as she could right at Bubble's mocking face. Her fist made contact with Bubbles's face, but instead of hearing the usual dull thud of a practice session punch, her ears were greeted with a loud crack._

_ Bubbles sank wailing to the ground, and the wrestling ring dissolved into a white void. The Professor and Blossom rushed into the cell and surrounded Bubbles._

_ "Bubbles!" the Professor said as he picked Bubbles up. Bubbles was shuddering, and as Buttercup cautiously moved in closer, she saw blood coming out of her nose._

_ "Mah nod!" Bubbles managed to get out._

_ "I know, I know." The Professor pinched the bridge of Bubbles's nose (to stop the bleeding, Buttercup later realized). He felt around her face a little, and breathed a sigh of relief. "Well, it doesn't look like your nose is broken. You'll be fine, Bubbles." _

_ Bubbles's cries slowed to a trickle. "How do you know?" she mumbled soft enough for her pinched nose not to affect her voice._

_Buttercup looked at her own hand and noticed bloody knuckles. She interrupted before the Professor could answer Bubbles. "What about my hand, Professor? It got pretty messed up, too!" She waved it around as proof._

_He sighed. "What did I say about the face, Buttercup? You don't hit your sister in the face! Bubbles, hold your nose right here, where I'm holding it." Bubbles did what he told her to do. _

_As the Professor moved in to check out Buttercup's hand, she said something she probably shouldn't have. And she said it loud enough for Bubbles to hear. "Well, Bubbles doesn't have to be such a wimp about it."_

Buttercup woke up in a cold sweat again. The second time in that same damn night. Only, there were a few distinct differences from the first time she woke up. For one, she could tell that it was light out, because this room had a small window in the top corner. Second, there was a man with a grey beard sitting in a chair right next to her.

"Oh, good! You're awake!" The man in the chair looked up from his clipboard and took off his reading glasses, which hung from a chain around his neck.

Buttercup asked the obvious question. "Who the hell are you?" She shook her head trying to remember why she was in this room in the first place. Something to do with Him…

"I'm Dr. Freud Yanslip," he said as he held his hand out. Like hell Buttercup was going to shake it.

"Doctor? I don't need a damn doctor." Buttercup began piecing the events of the night together again in her head. Peppers…

"Oh, I'm not here to perform a medical examination on you, dear." The doctor awkwardly put his hand back down. "I just want to have a little chat with you, that's all."

Buttercup was a lot of things, but she wasn't stupid. "Like hell you are. Just psychoanalyze me and go away, okay?" Buttercup remembered looking for peppers, very vigorously… _very _vigorously.

"I told you… Buttercup, I believe? I told you that I'm not here for that. I just want to talk with you. Is that okay?"

"Honestly? Not really." How many rooms had Buttercup hit? Five? Ten? Who knew?

"How come?" The doctor reclined a little in his chair, and weaved his fingers together.

"Trust me, you don't want to talk to me." And she still hadn't found the peppers, had she? She knew the peppers were the easiest way to call Him back… but why would she want to do that?

"Of course I want to talk with you. Why else would I be here?"

This doctor was getting pretty annoying. Buttercup was trying to focus on recollecting the night's events, not entertaining some old dude. Also, it was kind of weird to know that an old dude had been watching you sleep. "Would you go away if I told you that I sold my soul to the Devil?" Buttercup was careful to word it in such a way that wouldn't directly make her guilty.

"I wouldn't believe you if you did."

"Would you believe me if I punched you in the face?" God, how she wanted the doctor to just get the hell out.

"Would you believe yourself in either case?" The doctor was trying to sound fancy, wasn't he? Well, he failed; he was just being confusing.

Buttercup leaned in towards the doctor, after making sure that she was fully clothed. "Listen, Doctor… whatever-"

"Yanslip," he interjected.

"Like I give a damn. Just get out of my room, okay?"

"Do you truly believe that you sold your soul?" Instead of getting up off his fat ass – it was a fairly fat ass, by the way, underneath a fairly fat body – the doctor scribbled something on his clipboard.

"Yes, I – why am I telling you this?" Buttercup realized that she was sitting upright. "Get out of my room!"

"I see. I think I may have just the person for you to meet, then." Buttercup didn't really care that he said that, because immediately afterwards he got up off the chair and left the room. "Good day to you, Buttercup."

And before Buttercup had a second to think, one of the nurse people came in.

"Can a girl get a single moment of privacy in this joint?" Buttercup threw her hands up in the air to emphasize her point.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," the nurse person said. "I just need to check your vitals. Heart rate, blood pressure… the normal stuff." She was a scrawny little thing, with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Buttercup knew that the nurse people did this every now and then. When they wanted to do it, there was literally no stopping them. Buttercup had tried in the past, and failed miserably. So she just sat and let the nurse take her damn vitals, because she knew the nurse would leave right afterwards.

Sure enough, she did. When Buttercup was finally alone, she noticed that there was a bump underneath her unreasonably squishy pillow. Now that all the people were gone, the bump was keeping her from concentrating. It was like the Princess and the Pea, only that instead of fifty mattresses, there was a single pillow, and instead of a pea…

Buttercup, with trembling hands, pulled out two chili peppers. The ones she had been looking for last night.


	12. Chapter 12 (Blossom)

Blossom knocked cautiously on the Mayor's office doors. The 'Do Not Disturb' sign was still hanging on the door, but Blossom assumed that it had been up ever since she had put it there. Thankfully, that was the case, and Blossom wasn't interrupting anything.

"Come in," Mrs. Bellum called from the other side of the door.

Blossom entered, and lost no time in cracking open her briefcase and slapping the paperwork onto Mrs. Bellum's desk. When Blossom finally looked at Mrs. Bellum herself, she found her to be in pleasant surprise.

"Well, Blossom, you've really outdone yourself. I didn't expect you to be back for another half hour, at least."

Blossom shrugged while she clicked her briefcase shut – getting a glimpse of the knife in it before it fully closed. "I try." Then she continued after a little pause, "Mrs. Bellum, did you know that Mitch Mitchelson is chief of police?"

Mrs. Bellum was confused. "Yes, Blossom, I did… what about it?"

"Oh, nothing. I just went to school with him a long time ago, that's all."

"Oh, really? Isn't that neat?" Then, after a brief pause, "Well, I was about to shoot you an email listing all of the things I need to do this week. I was hoping you could plan me out a schedule."

"Of course, Mrs. Bellum."

"Great. I'll get that to you right away, then." Mrs. Bellum gestured towards Blossom's office, and Blossom picked up her briefcase and went there. Blossom's office was actually like a smaller version of the Mayor's office, except that the door was to the side instead of directly ahead of Blossom's desk. She dropped her briefcase off beside her desk and turned the computer on.

It was the first time she turned that computer on, wasn't it? Blossom couldn't help but feel a little thrill. Sure, it was a generic desk job with a generic five-year-old computer, but it was her first day, and that was enough to make it exciting.

Actually, it wasn't just a generic desk job. She was, or at least Mrs. Bellum had made it seem like she was, second in command to the Mayor. She had to help guide an entire city, and one with frequent monster attacks and the scars of Chemical X. Nothing generic about that.

If anything, the most generic part of the job was the computer, and that was a minor detail. It took a while to boot up, but the Internet was fast enough – faster Internet in government buildings is something Mrs. Bellum had established in her last term. Blossom opened up her email address. She only had one, her professional one, because she never really did anything on the Internet that was unacceptable to conflate with her working life.

There were three new messages. One, of course, was from Mrs. Bellum, with the list of things to do that week. There was another from the law firm that dealt with all the legal stuff surrounding the Professor's death. Blossom needed to go sort out the Professor's will. A depressing prospect to be sure, but it had to be done, and Buttercup and Bubbles certainly weren't in any position to do it.

This last point was validated by the third email. It was from the Psychiatric Hospital of Townsville. Blossom tensed instantly upon noticing it, because the hospital rarely emailed her, and when they did, it was usually something bad.

_Blossom,_

_ Due to recent especially irrational behaviors exhibited by your sister Buttercup, I, Dr. Freud Yanslip, was called to perform a psychological analysis on her. Her reduced social interaction is a sign of paranoia, which is also displayed in her irrational belief that she sold her soul to the Devil. As this recent relapse into mental instability concerns me as much as it does you, I would like to set up a meeting between you and me, and possibly Buttercup herself. Please reply to this message with a specific day and time that works best for you, preferably a weekday._

_ To Buttercup's health,_

_ Dr. Freud Yanslip_

_ Psychiatric Hospital of Townsville Psychiatrist_

Buttercup thinks the Devil has her soul? Blossom considered the notion for a while. Was she just hallucinating? Maybe Buttercup had some nightmare that felt real. Maybe she had memories of… Him. In any case, Blossom would need to talk to Buttercup as soon as possible.

Before asking Mrs. Bellum for a day off, embarrassingly the second day that Blossom was supposed to be working, Blossom checked the other email, about the Professor's will, to see if she could plan both visits on the same day. She could, and so she did.

"Mrs. Bellum?" Blossom said after peaking her head through her office door.

Mrs. Bellum looked up from some pressing document in front of her. There was no one else in the room. "Yes, Blossom?"

Blossom blushed a little. "Can I have the day off tomorrow?" Not the best thing to say on your first day by a long shot.

"Whatever for?"

"Some… family matters came up. About the Professor… and Buttercup." God, Blossom really had to force those lumps out of her throat. She could always think about these serious things rationally in her head, but when it came time to directly address them in speech… not so much.

Mrs. Bellum smiled understandingly, as far as Blossom could tell, underneath her characteristic shock of hair. "Of course, Blossom, of course. Taking care of your sister is far more important. Don't worry; I won't dock your pay or anything. Emergencies happen." It was uncanny, sometimes, how Mrs. Bellum always knew the truth without having heard a word of it.

"I get a paid day off? On my second day?"

Mrs. Bellum shrugged. "Consider it a gift, between long time friends."

Blossom had to smile. She could always count on Mrs. Bellum to understand anything and everything that could possibly happen to her. "Thank you, Mrs. Bellum."

"You're welcome, Blossom. Now, Blossom," she wagged her pen sarcastically, "for today, get to work on that schedule, okay?"

"I'm on it," Blossom said before returning to her desk.

She emailed the two people back, setting up a morning appointment at ten o' clock with the lawyer and an afternoon meeting at one o' clock with the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist's meeting was later for a reason; if Blossom needed to stay with Buttercup, for some long period of time, she could. Proud of her ability to plan ahead enough to forget about the sad topics of the actual appointments she had made, Blossom began work on Mrs. Bellum's schedule.


	13. Chapter 13 (Bubbles)

Paul Phillip Grey was playing on the living room floor. His mother watched as he picked up a red block, and a blue block, and a green block, and stacked them on top of each other only to knock the tower down a second later. He burst into laughter, laughter that warmed Sara's extremities like a swig of brandy, and repeated the process. Stack, stack, stack, knock, laugh. Rinse and repeat. It was so adorable that Sara could hardly focus on the novel she was reading.

Sara put the book down. It was pointless trying to actually read anything. The Professor's death was still swimming in some murky corner of her mind, but her child occupied the majority of her attention. There was a certain freedom to the way he was playing; no actions had any strings attached. Nothing he did, whether he stacked the blue block first or last or in between, affected the next tower's structure. His past designs were unimportant, as he would inevitably laugh at their collapse and rebuild again and again. It was all so innocent. Nobody was hurt or helped by his play; it had no rewards, no consequences, and no stakes. Bubbles adored that about children. They have no sense of responsibility, and so are free of worry.

And after a while of observing the purest form of happiness a human can exist, over and over again, even the most tried and troubled people can find smiles on their faces. Such was the case with Bubbles, especially since the child was her own.

Every now and then, during his giggling periods, Paul would ever so quickly look his mother in the eye. Little perfect blue eyes, they were, almost as blue as Sara's eyes. Then he would smile, and go back to stacking his blocks. Red, green, blue. Knocked over and laughed off. Green, red, blue. Knocked over and laughed off. The repetitiveness of it put Sara in a trance.

A trance that was broken when Paul hit the tower too hard one time, and the blue block went flying out of his reach. Sara nearly jumped out of her seat when the thing clacked on the hardwood floor instead of on the rug Paul was playing on. She jumped from surprise, but also from a desire to dive for the block and give it back to her son, just so she could watch him stack it again with the others. She definitely didn't want Paul to be upset that his game was interrupted.

Sara kept her butt glued to the couch, though, because Paul stood up the moment he heard the blue block hit the floor. He had learned to walk already, but was still fairly new at it, and so took several wobbly steps to the block. Very wobbly steps, actually; at times, Sara was afraid that he would fall over. He didn't fall over, though. He made it to the block, picked it up with tremendous effort, and toddled just as unstably back to the rug.

He didn't sit down. Instead, he walked right up to Sara's hands, which happened to be at the ends of outstretched arms. He dropped the block into his mother's palms.

"Boo!" Blue, he was saying. It had been his first word, blue, and the only word he had ever said.

Sara smiled, picked up little Paul, and plopped his onto her lap. "That's right! It's blue," she said, waving the block.

"Boo!" Paul grabbed for the blue block once more. Sara let him take it and placed him back on the rug, at which point he promptly scuttled over to the other two blocks. He held the green one. "Geen!"

Sara nearly lost her mind just then. Paul's second word! If that wasn't one of those generic milestones you're supposed to write down in a baby book, nothing was. "Green!" Sara echoed her child in the singsong voice a mother uses with an infant. "That block is green! Good job, Paul!"

Just as Sara was moving to pinch Paul's cute little cheeks, he astonished her again by grabbing the third block. "Wed!"

Two new words in one day? That has to be a record or something. It has to be. "Red!" Sara embraced Paul ferociously, and it almost stunned the poor thing. He was still laughing, though.

Paul's small hands held onto clumps of Sara's shirt as he hugged back. "Boo," he called her.

"No Paul, I'm mama." She was still talking in baby-speak. "Mama. Can you say mama?"

"Boo," Well, she couldn't expect him to learn _three_ new word in the span on a few minutes. It was a nice try, though. What concerned Sara more than the response was its relative lack of enthusiasm. For a short moment, she thought that Paul had some kind of antagonism towards her as a person, but quickly remembered that a child that young didn't really have the capacity for deep-seated hatred. That, and the fact that mother and child have an inalienable, unconditional, mutual love (at least, in functional families). Using her approximately one year old parenting skills, Sara reasoned that Paul was just tired from so many minutes of physical play, and probably just needed something to eat.

And now that she thought about it, she could use a snack as well.

Sara held Paul half an arm's length away and looked into his bright blue eyes. He looked into hers as she said, still in that singsong voice, "Now, you stay right here, okay Paul? I'm going to get you some food." She nuzzled his face with her nose before setting him on the ground. He began tinkering with the three blocks again, but was noticeably more lethargic, and didn't bother stacking them into a tower.

It wasn't long before Sara had one half of a banana chopped and in a bowl and the other half in her mouth. Paul really liked bananas, for some reason, and Sara didn't mind them either. In any case, it made for a convenient quick snack.

Sara threw away the peel on her way out of the kitchen after grabbing a plastic spoon. She sat down cross-legged in front of Paul, who was still picking up one block or the other without actually stacking them.

"Boo," Paul said without a block in his hands. At first, Sara was inclined to frown lovingly and correct him that she was, in fact, mama. However, she saw that her son was not pointing at her, but at the plastic bowl and spoon she had in her hands. They were both blue.

"That's right, Paul! The bowl and the spoon are blue!" She scooped up a spoonful of banana. "Now, open wide, Paul." He took the food happily, and then grabbed for the spoon. Sara smiled. He wanted to try feeding himself, apparently. She handed over the spoon and watched her son struggle to get a substantial amount of banana on the end of it.

Suddenly, the phone rang. It was the landline, and the awful noise it made was almost enough to make Paul cry. Sara rushed to pick up the phone before he could.

"Hello, this is Sara Grey. To whom am I speaking?" The landline didn't have caller ID, because it was built into the wall and the house was pretty old. Old enough to have phones without caller ID, at least.

"Hey Sara. It's Lilly." Lilly and James Oliver was Sara's neighbors, and close family friends of the Greys. Lilly always sounded like she was on a sugar high over the phone, but now she seemed especially excited. "I have some thing really exciting to tell you! Like, really exciting!"

"What? What is it?"

She paused dramatically. "I'm pregnant!"

"Really? That's great!"

She sighed happily over the phone. "It's about time, isn't it? We've been trying for _ages_ now, but it's finally happening! I literally just got out of the doctor's office; he said I can start telling people now."

Sara laughed a little. "I guess Paul can have a friend now, huh?"

"Yeah," Lilly laughed with her. "You gotta tell me all those baby raising tips when the time comes, okay, Sara?"

Sara laughed some more. "Okay, Lilly, I will. I promise."

Sara could just imagine Lilly wagging her finger at her cell phone. "I'll hold you to it." Then, after an awkward little silence, "So, what are you doing?"

"Oh, nothing much, just watching Paul. You know, he said two new words today."

"Really?" Lilly sounded genuinely interested. She was really obsessed with babies and the like, and for the last year she had almost kept as close of an eye on Paul as Sara herself. It wasn't an invasive eye, though, but more of a helpful and supportive one. Sara appreciated it, and told herself to take the same interest in Lilly's child. "What were they?"

"Red and green. He could already say blue; it was his first word. And the coolest thing is, he actually knows what colors he's talking about."

"You mean, like, if you give him a red block, he'll say it's red? Or green or blue if it's those colors?"

Well, that was startlingly accurate. "Exactly like that, actually. That's what he was doing when he said the words."

"You've got one smart kid there, Sara. I've been reading these baby forums ever since you told me that Paul said 'blue,' and they say that babies don't start naming colors until they're about 18 to 24 months old. Are you sure he doesn't think those colors are the names of the blocks?"

"No, he knows they are colors. He called a bowl and a spoon blue today, also."

"Were the spoon and bowl blue?"

Why was Lilly trying to disprove Paul's first three words so strongly? Knowing her, probably because they didn't fit in with the formulas on her baby forums. "Yeah, they are blue. I could _see_ them."

"Holy Jesus, then, Sara!" Lilly said, having confirmed the accuracy of Sara's claim. "Paul knows three colors, and he's only a year old! He's a really special child, Sara. One of a kind. A genius."

"I guess he is-" was all Sara managed to speak before the phone fell from her hands, hitting the hardwood floor with a resonating thud. She had turned around to look at Paul eating his banana, just to see how much of it was on the floor and how much had actually ended up in his mouth. What she found instead was Paul giggling next to the melted remains of what had once been a plastic bowl. The air smelled of gasoline.

Actually, of Chemical X.


	14. Chapter 14 (Buttercup)

Buttercup was now faced with a horrendously pressing question.

_Should I eat the peppers?_

She could barely see the things, her hands were shaking so much. She hated anything having to with Him. It was all his fault that she losing her mind anyways, and she was going to bring Him back? What the hell kind of sense does that make?

But something yanked Buttercup back as she lurched forward to hurl the peppers as far away from her as she possibly could. There was a reason she had called Him back last night in the first place. Last night – it felt like ages ago, but it was last night – she had to clarify some things about her soul. That's why she would bring him up again, so she could get information. Nothing else but information.

Yet another force repelled the peppers from Buttercup's mouth. She didn't get much knowledge from Him, though, did she? Why should she expect for it to be different this time? He would just mess with her mind again, like he had last night…

No. Buttercup would not let Him into her life again. Never again. She had gone on a freaking rampage because of Him – a_ rampage_. Crazy people do shit like that, and Buttercup wasn't actually crazy… just chilling in a mental hospital, that's all. But she had to ensure her future sanity, just incase she really was losing it, and inviting Satan into her room wouldn't exactly help with that.

Yet, as Buttercup's mind vehemently denied the notion of biting the peppers, her body once again began leading them up to her mouth. Buttercup was in violent tremors now; at times the peppers would flick her face, and at others they would be one sweaty finger away from flying right out the window. Her bed was vibrating, because she was vibrating. The dilemma was killing her. She was maybe fifteen seconds from passing out.

And then one thought – _one thought _ – was all it took to finally push her over the edge and make a decision.

_He'll tell me if he's messing with my mind. No one can be _that_ evil._

No one can be that evil? What a load of bullshit! He was Him, for crying out loud; he was created specifically to cause hatred and mayhem and apathy and loathing. Of course he could be that evil. He _was_ evil, as in two were one in the same. But the obvious counterargument came too late; Buttercup shoved the two peppers into her mouth and decapitated them with one fell swoop of her jaw.

One of the peppers was, as was promised, just a regular pepper. It was terribly spicy, but had nothing else to it than that. The other one, though, was truly a pepper from hell. The moment the thing was sliced open, fire ants burst out of her mouth, scattering on her lap and dribbling down her chin and neck. Buttercup rolled off the bed and fell onto the floor with a thud, but the ant-laden blankets followed her down and kept her tingling with the insects. Buttercup squirmed and writhed viciously on the ground, and it felt like the ants were… getting bigger?

Buttercup opened her eyes and was horrified to see herself wearing a suit of dime-sized fire ants, all taking chunks of her skin in their teeth before letting go again. It hurt like hell, but somehow Buttercup managed to keep herself from screaming. The last thing she wanted in the room was a nurse.

After what felt like an agonizing half hour but was actually a few minutes, a swirling red disc of gas grew in the center of the room to reveal Him.

"Calling me back so soon?" he said in that stupid voice of his. Oh God, why'd she have to hear _that_ as she was being mauled by ants the size of cockroaches? "I'm flattered."

Buttercup chucked a palm-sized ant at his face, but it just phased through. She had to rip one off her face and another off her upper arm before she could say anything; to say the pain of hundreds of giant ant bites was excruciating would be an insulting understatement. She was determined not to scream, though, so she just grit her teeth. "What the hell's up with these goddamn ants?" She used her fingers to unclamp an ant from that piece of skin between the thumb and index finger on the left hand.

Buttercup wanted to punch Him, because what he did next was smirk. _Smirk_. "That's not why you called me over. I know it isn't, because they came _after_ you bit the peppers, now, didn't they?" His voice suddenly became more sinister and deeper, but with the same echoing reverb of the original. "Tell me why you disturbed me in the middle of the day or I'll turn each of those ants into fucking scorpions."

God, she hated Him, because he was right. There was no use jacking around with the ants – which, by the way, were more life tarantulas with sickles for jaws at this time – when she had a mission to complete. She had to get to the bottom of her soul crisis, whether or not she was having her blood drawn by demon ants. "Can you control my soul, since you have it? Have you been controlling it this whole time?" She asked those questions as calmly, clearly, and authoritatively as she would while flinging grapefruit sized fire ants from her person. How her skin wasn't one big red ant bite was a mystery.

"I can't do anything to your soul." He smirked even harder than he had before. "Yet. And Buttercup, about the ants… there's only one way to get rid of them."

"What?" She threw an especially large cantaloupe ant off her back to show her urgency. The ants – it was more fit to call them creatures at this point – had seriously damaged her skin, and showed no signs of stopping their rampage of pain. However, she wasn't going to scream, or even be loud, for that matter. No nurses.

When he whispered, it sounded like he done it directly into her ear. It almost made her ear start bleeding again, the sound was so vile. "Chemical X." And, aggravatingly, he waited for Buttercup's eyes to widen, and then was gone in a flash with nothing but a "Toodles!" and a puff of smoke to mark his departure.

Maybe aggravatingly wasn't a strong enough word, because Buttercup pretty much lost her shit when he just ditched her like that. Yes, she was concerned about the astounding lack of new information she had regarding her sold soul, but presently the puppy sized ants that were growling and biting at her blistered and bleeding skin were a more pressing matter. She had made herself a promise several minutes ago – it felt like years, but it was really minutes – that she wouldn't scream, for fear of the nurse people. After a housecat-sized ant dug its jaws several inches into Buttercup's left calf, though, she broke her promise in a heartbeat.

She screamed as loud as she could. In fact, she screamed so loud that the ants were blasted back at least fifteen feet, expect for the one attached to her leg. She screamed so loud that the furniture in the room rattled and the walls shook, and a light bulb somewhere burst into glassy shards. When the scream finally ended, her mouth was left with the lingering air of gasoline.

Immediately afterwards, Buttercup did something that overrode the taste of Chemical X with that of her stomach jumping into her throat. She looked down at the ant gnawing through her bloody leg – there was at least a pint of blood painting the floor, for sure – and shot a laser at it. A laser. From her eyeballs. It struck the ant on the left side and it piffed out of existence upon contact. In fact, the ant vanished so quickly that it failed to absorb the entirety of the beam, and the floor was left with a splatter of black ash that singed Buttercup's skin when a few sparks flew up onto it.

Had she learned nothing from the Incident? From Bubbles? Could she really have been _that_ stupid, and rash, and… crazy? She just used a laser beam, just like that – and this wasn't like the mini laser blips she had used to light candles the night before. The night before? God, it really didn't feel like that was the night before. But it was the night before.

Anyways, these lasers were different, because she put force behind them. But the thing is, they worked. The laser made that first ant vanish completely. And there was nobody in the room to hurt…

Buttercup began furiously blasting the foul creatures, which were now like ant-shaped pigs. Literally nightmare fuel for most of the population. Buttercup, of course, was not scared of them – though she imagined that any nurse person who walked in would be terrified, to say the least. She was, however, badly injured, with her skin missing in several places and spitting blood and poison all over the bed sheets and floor. When she wasn't noticing the pain, she was leaving ashy streaks where there had once been ants. One laser hit the bed and drilled a neat little hole in it. Another, after piercing four or so ant-swine, bounced off a reflective panel on the wall and nearly struck Buttercup right in the face. She had to be paying attention to dodge it in time, and she was. In fact, between her active usage of Chemical X and the walking corpse her mutilated body looked like at the moment, she almost forgot to hate Him.

Almost.

There weren't words to describe how much, at that moment, Buttercup despised the very thought of Him. How much she loathed Him, and how much she wished to put a nice, long slit in his goddamn throat. If anybody ever used such a word, they might just burn their tongue in speaking it, or their hand in writing it. To have ever thought that there could be a good side to Him, and that she could negotiate fairly with Him, or that she might glean some information from Him, not only seemed to Buttercup naïve, but entirely disgusting.

Firing laser after Chemical X laden laser at the ants had temporarily put Buttercup in a paradoxical state of simultaneous hyperawareness and oblivion. She could focus with tremendous sharpness on any particular ant and blast it into smithereens, and then move quickly and with purpose to the next ant. At the same time, she could ignore her surroundings and contemplate her current standing with and feelings towards Him, or Blossom and Bubbles, for that matter. This surprisingly tranquil state – ironically, the period she had spent illegally destroying satanic insects with her eyeballs was the most at peace she had felt in days, despite there being no actual change in the security of her soul – was quickly killed however, when Buttercup realized that there was only one ant left.

Buttercup smirked confidently. She knew she could take down this son of a bitch with a single shot, no problem. She kind of laughed inwardly upon realizing that calling the ant a son of a bitch was the same as calling Him a bitch. Buttercup wanted to savor the moment. She was all bloodied up and all, but she wasn't dead. She wouldn't be giving her soul to Him completely any time soon. He had lost for now, and would have to wait a little longer for her to enter his realm. Knowing that she was on the brink of victory made her a little cocky, so she let the final ant grow larger for a while, just to make its demise more spectacular. It was about the size of a tiger before long.

Suddenly, the ant swung its terrible head at Buttercup, the jaws of which were now like a pair of hacksaws coming out of its face, and lunged. It startled Buttercup so greatly that she could not control the impulse to shoot her laser right then and there. The ant, of course, vaporized. But there was a much larger problem.

Buttercup had not really noticed, for the most part, when the nurse lady had opened the door. Buttercup had no clue how long she had been standing there, just watching, or if she had said anything to Buttercup. Whether the nurse lady – the same one, Buttercup realized in a fleeting glimpse of her panicked face Buttercup managed to steal just then, that had checked her vitals earlier that morning – had called for reinforcements, or begged Buttercup to stop, or tried to run the hell away, was a complete mystery. All that Buttercup could know for certain was that, after her last laser shot of the day was finished running through that pesky ant, it continued on and completely destroyed the left half of the nurse's body. The most horrible thing about it was that the right half her body, from the head to the foot, was perfectly intact to stare Buttercup back with a single terrorized eyeball before falling to the ground with an awful thud.

Buttercup was stunned. In the course of minutes, she had gone from calm to panicked to in pain to hateful to inexplicably and relatively happy to her present piercing guilt. She had done it again. It wasn't Bubbles this time, but… She couldn't even bring herself to compare this to the Incident even for a little while.

There wasn't a damn thing she could do, was there? Maybe some Chemical X would do the trick…

It didn't matter what Buttercup thought after a point, though, about Him or Chemical X or the Incident or the dead nurse. She had lost a little more blood than she had anticipated, and upon attempting to move towards the nurse's corpse was caught in a dizzying spell and promptly collapsed.

It was unclear to the nurses that rushed in just then to transport the barely alive Buttercup for how long she had been crying prior to losing consciousness. What they couldn't tell from the body, which was hardly moving with each difficult breath, was the thought Buttercup had thought on her way down.

No matter how much she hated Him, and how much she hated the notion of lauding Him for anything, she had to admit that he knew what the hell he was doing. It would've scared the shit out of her if she weren't so busy being knocked out.


	15. Chapter 15 (Bubbles)

What Sara decided to do was ignore her son's outburst entirely.

Even when he zapped the bowl again, this time right in front of her mother's eyes.

Ever since the day Paul was born, Bubbles had maintained this constant, nagging fear that he would have the same defect she and her sisters had. Every now and then, he had shown minute signs of an affiliation with Chemical X: maybe he hovered and inch off the ground for a second, or his food was inexplicably hotter after having been left unattended in front of him for a long time. Bubbles had done her best to ignore the signs, and had taken preventative measures such as feeding him on formula instead of her own breast milk, which could have contaminated him.

It obviously wasn't enough, because Paul had Chemical X in him. She saw him use it, right in front of her eyes. Normal babies don't do that. Paul _had_ Chemical X, undoubtedly.

But Bubbles didn't want to think about it. She had enough to do with Chemical X from her youth, and she didn't want it infecting her adulthood. She didn't want it to dictate her life or Paul's, or to put either of them in harm's way. All she could do was hope that it would drain out of his system with age.

Eventually, Sara noticed a distant murmur spewing through the telephone she had dropped. She picked it up without looking to see if Paul would attack the plastic bowl a third time.

"…Hello? …Hello?" Poor Lilly, Sara thought. How long had she left her hanging?

"Sorry, Lilly. I dropped the phone."

"Well, you sure took long enough to pick it back up. What happened? Are you all right?"

Sara tried to laugh reassuringly, but it came out sounding nervous. She cleared her throat. "Nothing happened. I just dropped the phone, that's all."

"If you say so…" After a cautionary pause, Lilly returned to her usual cheery self. "So, I was thinking that maybe you and Phillip, and of course Paul, could come over to our house for dinner one night, to celebrate. What do you say?"

Sara just about asked what they were celebrating, but luckily caught herself in time. Lilly was pregnant; that's what they were celebrating. "Of course, Lilly. When do we come?"

"Well, today's too soon, and tomorrow James has this thing he has to stay late at work for. How does the day after sound?"

"Sounds perfect. I'll tell Phillip." Sara thought carefully about how to properly bid her good day. "Congrats again, Lilly. I'll see you Wednesday evening, then."

"Thanks Sara. Bye!"

"Bye." Sara hung up, and suddenly was filled with an odd sensation of loneliness. She dared to look back at Paul, and to her relief found that the plastic bowl had not been deformed any further, nor had any furniture been set aflame. Not only that, but apparently the energy needed to muster up a full fledged laser beam twice must have knocked the wind out of him, because Paul was lying on his side and sound asleep in a lump of charred banana. Sara almost mechanically picked Paul up and cleaned his face, and put him in the crib in the other room.

Sara got a lump in her throat when she sat down on the living room couch again. She had to face the reality at some point. Her son would have a childhood disturbingly similar to her own. He would frolic around in his Chemical X laden body, using its powers to their fullest extent, until one day… he would get hurt. Bubbles had been lucky, all those years ago, that she lived, and with her body intact, too. But Paul may not be as lucky.

She would have to face that future, as would Phillip (though Sara imagined it would be harder for him to accept the situation). But for the moment, she could drown it out. She could drown it out with normal baby stuff, and the dinner she and her family were to attend in two days. She could drown it out with the minutia of daily life, with washing the dishes or cooking supper or making a trip to the grocery store. Presently, her weapon of choice was the novel she had been reading. She decided that after the book ran out of pages – Sara was nearing the end of the novel – she would turn on the news or something.

Anything to forget the blue plastic bowl that lay fused to the floor in front of her.


	16. Chapter 16 (Buttercup)

Buttercup had quite the trip while unconscious, because she didn't feel unconscious at all. Rather, she felt removed from her actual body entirely. It was as if she were lucid dreaming.

Probably because she was, but not of her own accord.

Buttercup checked her skin first, and then her surroundings. Her body was perfectly all right; there wasn't a gash or an ant bite to be seen, nor did it hurt anywhere. She was in some sort of room, entirely red on every wall, with a low ceiling and high pile red carpet. She was strapped to some sort of chair, and it was kind of uncomfortable. It almost took too much energy to care that she was strapped down, though; her head was spinning a bit, and every now and then her vision would go fuzzy.

Before long, an unfortunately familiar figure came into view. Women's clothes and menacing claws and all. Him.

"Hello, Buttercup," he said in that voice of his. Why did he even talk like that? "How are you doing?"

Buttercup looked up and down, and then straight ahead. She was alone in a room with Him, strapped to a chair. She didn't feel like she was actually in her own body. There could only be one explanation. "Am I in hell?"

It was almost like the question astonished Him, based on the way he gasped. "Well, I'll say! If that's what you think of my living room – no wonder you're down here."

"Am I dead?" Buttercup clarified, with a growing apprehension that the answer would be yes.

But of course, she didn't get a clear answer from Him. She should of learned that by now. Instead, he just smiled. "It depends on whether or not I want you to be."

Buttercup decided against angering Him on his home turf. "Am I actually here? Where is here? Where am I?"

He tossed her a pitying look. "Oh, Buttercup, you are so stupid!" He said stupid like it had a y in it. Very annoying. "Didn't I already say you were in my living room?"

"I don't feel like I am." She really didn't. It was the strangest sensation; she was without a doubt sitting upright, yet she felt as if she were lying down.

"That's because you're not. And you are. You see, Buttercup, you're body is perfectly fine, on a gurney on its way to the hospital." He chuckled. "Or at least, as fine as a body that mangled can be. Point being, I haven't touched your corpse. Your soul though…" He fingered some glowing orb thing in his breast pocket; Buttercup couldn't really see it too well under the poof of his coat. "Well, that's what I've brought you here. So we can work out _exactly_ when to start your damnation."

"So I am dead. Dead and damned. Great."

He wagged the finger he didn't have. "Not yet. I could send you to hell right now, if I wanted to. But presently, it doesn't really tickle my fancy."

"So then what does 'tickle your fancy,' stuffing a pepper with mutant ant demons? I don't get what the hell was up with that, and I'm going to be pissed if you can't give me a damn good explanation!" For some reason, the phrase 'tickle my fancy' annoyed her to no end, and Buttercup got a little too heated up without much precedent. At first, she thought it was just her temper, but realized that the room itself was pretty hot too.

He did that freaky thing where it sounded like he was whispering straight into your ear again. It could be really unnerving. It usually was. "It would be best, Buttercup, if you just shut up and let me talk for a while. Don't forget who has your soul." The words sent ice tingling down Buttercup's spine.

He returned to using his normal voice. It was still incredibly off-putting, but it was far better than the detached whisper any day. "You want an explanation, Buttercup?" He took a seat on a couch, which for some reason had escaped Buttercup's attention until then. "Lucky for you, I'm feeling generous. So I'll start from the beginning. You see, Buttercup, I've been around a long time. I've seen villains come and go. And I've noticed a flaw that nearly all of them, the best and the worst, had."

Buttercup almost told Him to shut up about the villain crap and explain the damn ants, but stopped herself just in time. She wasn't in the best position to piss Him off. He had her soul and probable damnation in his hands. At least she could keep her head level enough to think that through.

"Almost every villain ever has been impatient. Just too impatient! They showed such promise of bringing evil and chaos and destruction into the world, but then ruined it all by blurting out some confidential information, or pulling the trigger way too soon. And I realized, eventually, that this isn't just human nature, the nature of all mortals. You remember Mojo Jojo, right?"

Of course she did. How could she forget? And how was it relevant?

"Don't answer that. Anyways, I realized a while back that I couldn't rely on mortals to do my dirty work for me. About twenty years back, in fact."

Buttercup was sure her heart sank and her eyes got wider, but wasn't entirely sure. He couldn't have. It couldn't have been Him…

He smiled at Buttercup's unspoken prediction. "I believe you have a day you call 'The Incident'? I'll give you one guess as to whose fault it is."

Buttercup grit her teeth, more out of pain than of anger. "Yours."

Suddenly, his face was within inches of hers. "Nope!" His rosy cheeks and androgynous complexion quickly melted into the sinister face one would expect Satan to have. When he spoke, his voice and breath were like acid. "It's yours."

If Buttercup's guts could have sunk any lower, they would have shot out of the soles of her feet. She knew that he was lying, because she had tried to _prevent _the Incident from ending like it did. At the same time, she knew that he was right, because she had failed. It was very disorienting; for the first time ever, Buttercup could neither be certain that he was just speaking out of evil manipulation, nor could she say that he was entirely and shockingly correct. He was both, simultaneously, in a contradictory way that somehow seemed to fit his brand of psychological torture.

He returned to using his normal voice. It was still incredibly off-putting, but it was far better than in-the-face sadism any day. "I'd like you to think of me as a catalyst, Buttercup. See, as an immortal, cosmic law forbids my _direct_ intervention."

Buttercup found enough composure to be stupidly gutsy. "And attacking me with giant demon ant isn't direct intervention? You've got to be shitting me."

Thank God, instead of blowing up, he just gave her a villainous smile. "I had to do a little fibbing to let that one slide. But you did, after all, choose to bite the pepper of your own accord. In the same way, you _chose_ to fight that monster on the day of the Incident, and you fought miserably. In the days before, you _chose_ to make Bubbles feel unloved, and Blossom feel incompetent-"

"I didn't do that! You know about that?" Buttercup couldn't help but blurt it out. She didn't care if her soul was entirely at his mercy right now. This shit just got personal. "Did you do that?"

"As I said before, Buttercup, I can't directly-"

"Are you the one who screwed my family up for twenty fucking years?"

She shouldn't have done that. In the blink of an eye, he had whipped out the glowing orb in his breast pocket. It was a hollow green tinted orb with some red fluid inside, filled all the way to the top. Apparently, it was squishy, and the moment he dug his nails into the orb, Buttercup felt a sharp pain attack her from all sides.

He was attacking her soul. Buttercup's worst memories began flitting past inside her eyelids, which were blinking spastically. It was enough to make a former Powerpuff tear up. When he pulled his fingers out of the orb and Buttercup could see Him again, she found a small piece of her voice. "Is that…"

How many times could one guy refresh his smile? "Your soul, Buttercup. This is your soul. See the red stuff inside?" He sloshed the orb around. "That's damnation fluid."

"Damnation fluid?"

He rolled his eyes. "What will it take to get you to shut up, Buttercup? Can't you wait until I ask you a question? I control your soul and have the power to damn you for all eternity or inflict immediate and severe pain. Isn't that enough?" He waited a while to see if Buttercup would get a smart mouth again. She didn't. "Every time you do something 'evil,' from your point of view – evil is relative, you see – a little damnation fluid builds up in your soul. There's also the white equivalent, salvation fluid, which is added when you do something 'good,' from your perspective. Ever since the day you were born, you've been filling up you soul with these two fluids; every action has been recorded. However, when the soul fills up, the addition of either fluid will lead to a decrease in the volume of the other. Are you following this?"

"Sure…" Buttercup wasn't following it too well, but sensed that it wasn't going anywhere good.

"When you sold your soul, all those years ago, what you did is exactly what you think you did. Your soul left your body and entered my possession. There's something in the fine print that you obviously skimmed over, though. When you sell your soul, it loses the ability to replace damnation fluid with salvation fluid, but not the other way around."

Buttercup connected the dots. "So when I do something I think is bad, it's permanent. I get that much closer to damnation and can't fix it with good things."

"Precisely! And there's another thing you missed. What happens, do you think, when the soul fills up with damnation fluid, hmm?"

"I go to hell?" It was a pretty good guess, Buttercup supposed.

"That… or I can decide to let you live. Under one condition: I can control your thoughts and emotions and action, independently or not, whenever I want for the rest of your life."

"Then I refuse!" Buttercup was not about to let Him use her as an evil puppet, now that she knew what he was up to. "I'd rather rot in hell for all eternity then let you make me hurt people!"

He shot her down without hesitation. "Oh Buttercup, don't think for a moment that _you_ get to choose. You don't have a say in this at all. And don't worry; in due time, you will rot in hell. But for now, I'm going to need you to do some work for me." He refreshed his maniacal smile again. "Any last requests before I send you back to your corpse of a body, and suppress any parts of your memory that might jeopardize my plots?"

"You have plots? What plots?"

He put on a strict face. "Any last questions?"

There was no use fighting, or even whining. Buttercup was cornered. She had tried being passive, but of course that let Him continue with whatever evil 'plot' he wasn't spilling the beans about. A few times, she had gotten angry and said something harsh, but that only made things worse. Buttercup was tired. Maybe if she just got a few things answered, she could be back on her merry way to her puppet body again. "Just two."

"Okay then, what are they?" He caressed her soul with his claws as he said it, which was a really unnecessary touch. He had to do that?

"First question: When you said that I made Bubbles and Blossom feel so bad that our entire lives got jacked up… that was all you, wasn't it?"

"Remember, Buttercup, I can't directly influence peoples' minds when their souls are not full to the brim with damnation fluid. I might have helped it happen though. Next question."

Well, that wasn't much of an answer. What did she expect? "Second, what _was_ the deal with those ants? And the peppers? Why ants and peppers? Really, why?"

He flung his claws up in the air, and damn near dropped Buttercup's soul when he did it. "I needed to push you over the brink somehow! I knew I would have to trick you into using your Chemical X, because it was a guaranteed way for you to do something 'evil.' Murdering a nurse with Chemical X did just the trick to put your soul in my command. As for the specific choice of ants and peppers… it was purely artistic. I just thought it would be fun for me and painful for you. Is that it?"

"Wait!"

"That's it." He cut Buttercup off. "We'll discuss this on some later date, Buttercup, when my plot is a little closer to completion. Who knows, maybe Bubbles will be in a seat right next to you!"

"What about Bubbles?"

"Until then, Buttercup. Goodbye!"

There was a flash of light, and the next thing Buttercup knew, she was looking up out of her real eyes. All of the pain her physical body was in surged back; all the ant bites and the loss of blood were real again. Her mind was back in her body, and her body was…

Buttercup managed to peel her eyes open – there were ant bites on her eyelids – to see the blaring lights of some hospital's emergency room. After that sorry excuse for a glance, she went under again.

It wouldn't matter that her body was at the complete mercy of Him if she was dead anyways, and Buttercup was really hanging onto life by a thread.


	17. Chapter 17 (Blossom)

The first call Blossom answered as Mrs. Bellum's secretary had nothing to do with Mrs. Bellum.

"Hello, this is the Mayor of Townsville's office. How may I help you?" The line was just a formality, of course; Blossom suspected that most callers would ask to be redirected to Mrs. Bellum herself.

An authoritative male voice replied. "May I speak to Ms. Blossom Utonium?"

"Speaking." Why would anyone be calling the Mayor's office to talk to the secretary? With a sinking feeling, her mind jumped to the conclusion that this was about her use of Chemical X in the morning. She held her breath. "May I ask who this is?"

"Dr. Harry Pitt, emergency physician at the Townsville General Hospital. I'm calling about your sister, Buttercup. She's in critical condition, Blossom, and she's lost a lot of blood. She needs a transfusion immediately, but we've run into a little problem. She has Type X blood, and you're the only other person on record who has Type X blood. For your sister's sake, we'll need you over at the hospital as soon as possible. Can you make it?"

Blossom barely managed to utter an "I'm on my way" before she dropped the phone and sprinted for the door. She didn't question the call at all, or bother to ask what exactly had happened to Buttercup, or even wonder if Type X blood was even a thing. Mrs. Bellum jumped when Blossom burst into her office.

"Blossom! What's going on?"

Blossom didn't even turn her spinning head back to look at Mrs. Bellum. "Buttercup's in the emergency room." Confident that those five words would be enough explanation for someone as understanding as Mrs. Bellum, Blossom sped out of the office and was outside of Town Hall in a matter of seconds.

There was no time to wait for a cab. Even if Blossom managed to hail one quickly, it would take forever to reach the hospital, which was clear on the other side of town, by car. It would be half an hour at least, especially with people beginning to go on lunch break. She couldn't just get up and _fly_ there, either. She could hope that Townsville had forgotten her running a little fast that very morning, but there was no way she could escape persecution if she was seen using Chemical X to fly.

But what if they didn't see her fly?

Blossom ran around to the back of Town Hall, which formed a sort of alleyway with the adjacent building. She had experimented with a certain power, a Chemical X based power, twenty years ago, but had never quite mastered it. The Incident had cut its development short, but now Blossom needed it more than ever. Besides, Buttercup was worth the risk. She concentrated her energy towards her skin, which glowed red for about a second before fading away. Not the glow, by the way; Blossom's actual skin began fading, and within five seconds, she could see through her hands. Within ten, her entire person was invisible to the human eye.

Miraculously, Blossom noticed, her clothes had become transparent as well. She breathed a sigh of relief. She wouldn't have to strip down to the skin, like in the movies. But Blossom couldn't stay relaxed for too long. Now able to fly without detection by pedestrian eyes, Blossom, for the first time in twenty years, took to the sky.

There were a couple of things Blossom noticed, and to say they amazed her would be a severe understatement. The first was the astonishing ease of controlling the flow of Chemical X around her body. She was perfectly able to maintain steady flight and keep herself invisible and still have brainpower left to think. It took her by surprise that she wasn't even a little bit rusty after twenty years of her powers being dormant, especially with her unwitting loss of control when running to work that morning. She supposed that it was hard to keep the Chemical X suppressed, but easy to direct it once it was allowed to flow.

The second was the breathtaking view Blossom had of the city. She hadn't had a bird's eye view like this in twenty years, and it gave her a chance to scan the cityscape for anything eye-catching. There were cars crawling around the streets and people the size of ants scuttling in and out of buildings. Before long, Blossom noticed a sort of parade advancing on the west side of Townsville. There was a monster carcass on a trailer, and Blossom could swear that even at her altitude, she could hear the townspeople cheering. Undoubtedly, the as-of-yet undefeated Townsville Municipal Guard was the recipient of the applause, along with its leader, Commander Princess Morbucks. Yes, _that_ Princess Morbucks.

Ever since the day that Princess took command of the Guard, Blossom maintained a creeping suspicion that she had paid her way to the position and was simply milking it for the glory. However, Blossom would never dare say that in public; as much as Princess had tended towards villainy as a child, Blossom couldn't argue that she was doing a terrible, generally inadequate, or even mediocre job of keeping the city safe. Maybe she actually did go through military training, just like Mitch Mitchelson had actually attended a police academy. Princess, or Commander Morbucks, as she was usually know as, had pretty much fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming a Powerpuff girl, except for the bad reputation and chemical doping associated with the real ones. Princess got her way in the end.

Why was _this_ the end, though? It wasn't, and Princess was definitely not the only component of the obviously continuing world, so Blossom turned her attention elsewhere. The moment she peeled her eyes off the parade, she found them locked on a couple of men in black ski masks standing outside an art museum. How Blossom could discern individual actions from such a macroscopic vantage point was beyond her, but she could. There were two men, one skinny and one burly, and they were making their way to the back of the museum. Their getaway car – Blossom knew it was theirs, because the skinny guy took some sort of sack and a crowbar out of it – was parked nearby.

Blossom's stomach turned to stone. Twenty years ago, if she had seen what she was seeing now, undoubtedly she would have given the pair an ass whooping before they even set foot in the museum. Now she couldn't. She was already in the air and getting used to her powers, and invisible, for that matter; she could stop the crime without being seen, if she wanted to. But she not only didn't want to, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. If her invisibility wore off, she would be done for; the ruthless jury would want to her spend as much of her life in prison as possible. If it didn't wear off, then she could trampled upon by law enforcement and museum security whenever they came to take care of the situation. That was the thing – Blossom could count on the police to save the museum's art with full confidence. Besides, Blossom wasn't on a joy ride. She had to get to Buttercup and save her life.

Buttercup. She was flying for Buttercup. She had broken the law to give Buttercup her own blood and save her life. From what, Blossom had no idea; for the first time, she questioned the authenticity of the call from Dr. Harry Pitt. Harry Pitt… wasn't that the guy who was always rolling around in the mud as a kindergartener? It was an insignificant and short-winded thought, though, and Blossom's mind snapped back to Buttercup. At least, it wished it could.

That is not to say that Blossom didn't care about her sister very much, or was not able to occupy the majority of her thoughts to the task of keeping Buttercup alive. But while Blossom landed in some dark corner beside the hospital, and while she checked in at the front desk and asked for Dr. Pitt, and while she followed the doctor to a room and gave as much blood as she was allowed to give, she couldn't help but preserve a kernel of disappointment completely unrelated to Buttercup's situation. Even when Blossom saw her sister's critical condition for the first time, and even after doing so knocked the wind out of her, she still, in the back of her mind, was jealous of Princes and angry at the art robbers, and dissatisfied that she could do nothing about neither of those feelings without jeopardizing her life of Buttercup's.


	18. Chapter 18 (Buttercup)

Buttercup lay in a precarious physical condition until Blossom's blood was able to save her, and in that time she found her mind drifting from memory to memory in a hopeless attempt to answer a single question.

Was it all her fault?

The Incident, and Bubbles running away, and the Professor dying, and everything else in her life that was screwed up… were they all the way they were because of her? Or was it because of Him? Buttercup realized with a jolt that he could have artificially implanted every thought she was thinking presently, but the notion left her attention just as quickly as it had entered. She was incapable of suspecting Him of invasion into her mind within seconds.

What she was capable of was calling her most poignant memories to the stage. Every now and then, her eyes would get a flash of the hospital lights, and perhaps she turned her head every now and then. There were doctors on every side of her, as far as she could tell. Her physical surroundings were of little importance to her at the moment. After a certain point, when the morphine had kicked in and a body's worth of pain melted away, Buttercup allowed herself to be completely absorbed by her mind.

_"It's over, Mojo Jojo!" Blossom declared in her standard fashion. It was about a week before the Incident. The Powerpuff Girls had just burst through the roof of Mojo's lair to capture him before he could launch another missile at Town Hall._

_ Mojo was sitting in a recliner and wearing fuzzy slippers and pajamas. It was ten o'clock at night – way past bedtime. He looked up from his book. "What line? What do you want from me? Can't you see that I am merely sitting here reading, which is to say that I am doing no other activity as my attention is entirely devoted to scanning the words on this page in front of me?"_

_ Buttercup zipped up to him and slapped the book out of his hands. "Don't give us that crap, Mojo! The missiles are coming from your lair! You've got to be up to something!"_

_ "Buttercup!" Bubbles squealed from behind, "Don't say that word!"_

_ "What word? Crap?"_

_ "Yes, that word!" They were five years old; crap was a bad word._

_ "Girls!" Blossom called for order, as she tended to do. "This isn't the time. We need to see what Mojo's up to."_

_ "I have already told you that I am doing no evil currently! Can you not see that I am trying to relax in my own home, with my slippers and pajamas and book, which are all indicators of my intention to unwind from a hard day's work?" Mojo pleaded._

_ "Then explain the missiles!" Blossom demanded. An explosion sounded off in the distance to validate Blossom's accusation._

_ "I have no clue what you are talking about. If I were launching missiles, then don't you think I would be at a control panel and pushing some big red button? Since I am not at a panel, nor am I pushing a big red button, it can be concluded that I therefore am not launching any missiles."_

_ Suddenly, Buttercup caught a glimpse of a creature at the control panel. It was spiderlike and fairly large, maybe the size of a big dog. It had black leathery legs with pink poofs at their bases. The creature actually looked like a spider or lizard version of Him._

_ It was Him._

Instantly, the memory dissipated, and a new one rose to take its place.

_The City of Townsville was under attack by some monstrous Godzilla wannabe. Normal, everyday stuff. Nothing major._

_ The monster knocked down a building downtown with its clubbed tail just as the Powerpuff Girls made it to the scene. The job seemed like a piece of cake. One monster, three girls – no contest as to the winner. Besides, from what Buttercup could tell, this monster was pretty derpy._

_ "Girls," Blossom commanded as usual, "I think we know what to do here."_

_ Buttercup got to work just as fast as the other two. Jab, jab, cross, uppercut. Not even a drop of sweat, and the monster was already reeling. Kick to the face, and an elbow to the kidney. Within ten seconds, the monster was out cold._

_ "Well, that was easy," Bubbles spoke aloud what Buttercup was thinking. "I don't even smell sweaty."_

_ As the girls drifted down onto the monster's body to accept the cheers of the crowd, Buttercup noticed something off in the distance, in the rubble of the building the monster crushed. There was a spiderlike creature, with a red torso and black, leathery legs, about the size of a large bear. She couldn't see it very clearly through the still airborne dust from the building's collapse, and before long it had vanished. But there was no mistaking its identity; it was the same creature she had spotted in Mojo's lair earlier that week._

_ It was Him._

Once again, her memory broke, as if by some external force, and was rebooted with a new memory in focus.

_It was the day of the Incident. Buttercup was so busy punching the underside of the monster - which, at the time, had only destroyed a third of the city – that she paid little attention to its jaws._

"_Buttercup!" Blossom yelled from off in the distance. "The Mayor!"_

_Buttercup spun her head to find the Mayor narrowly escaping the creature's jaws and, of course, clutching for dear life his emergency jar of pickles. She put her belly punching on hold in order to swoop by and remove the Mayor from danger, intentionally letting the jar shatter on the streets below._

"_My pickles!" the Mayor screamed. _

_Buttercup stared at him incredulously. "I just saved your life, and all you care about is a jar of god damn pickles?" Buttercup heard Blossom say something, but over the sound of her questioning the Mayor missed every word. She flew over to Blossom and blasted the leg that was squishing her with a laser beam._

_ "Not me, Buttercup!" Blossom was more panicked than relieved._

_ "Thank you would work," Buttercup suggested sarcastically._

_ "I said to save the Professor!"_

_ The world froze and graciously allowed Buttercup to fly to the mouth of the creature. Sure enough, the Professor was trapped inside of its jaws, being pumped with venom. Buttercup grabbed him by the armpits and tried to pull him out. She did, but barely. The jaws were a little relaxed at that exact moment, but still tight enough to give the professor a gnarly gash across the abdomen._

_ Buttercup was furious. She was furious at herself for not having saved the Professor earlier, before damage was inflicted, even though she would find out later that he was alive. She was furious at Blossom for not having made her instruction more clear. She was furious with Bubbles for not coming over and saving the Professor when Buttercup didn't. But mostly, she was furious at the cause of the damage, and the cause of what was turning out to be a really shitty day._

_ The creature loomed over Buttercup, with its black, leathery spider legs elevating the red torso high into the air. Eight yellow eyes stared down at Buttercup from above the venomous set of jaws that, in retrospect, looked a lot like the claws of a crab. Buttercup knew that she had seen the thing before. It was the same creature she had seen in Mojo's lair, and the same creature she had seen in the monster fight._

_ It was Him._

For the last time, Buttercup's mind went blank. There was nothing but an eternal blackness before her eyes, not one single thing. Sure, if she had opened her eyes, she probably would have seen something, but she didn't feel like she had the strength to do that. With her consciousness flushed and her subconscious locked from access, Buttercup was forced – by whom, she couldn't conceive – to make a verdict.

Was it all her fault?

Somehow, she overlooked the fact that the creature that attacked on the day of the Incident, the creature that wounded the Professor for life and tore her family apart looked like Him. Conceivably, it was Him… her mind checked itself and scratched the thought ahead of time. She told herself that this wasn't about Him. This was about herself, and if she was as guilty as she felt.

What Buttercup found was that, in a sense, she was. She saw the creature, the one that caused the Incident, at least a week in advance, when it was at a much more manageable size. She could have told her sisters about it then. She could have sworn she did, but her memory failed to back that claim up. Had she informed Blossom and Bubbles, though, they surely would have defeated the creature before it grew to Incident proportions.

It was her fault. All of it. If she had only taken care of the problem when it was able to be taken care of…

The Incident, and its results, was Buttercup's fault. And now she had to live with that.

But maybe, just maybe, there was a way to protect Blossom and Bubbles from the same fate. She had to carry the burden of the Incident, because she had screwed up. It couldn't be long before the same type of mistake would befall her sisters. She had already let Mojo Jojo, the Mayor, and her own goddamn father die because of something she did wrong. She wouldn't allow her sisters to do the same, to themselves or to other people.

There was a way to save the world, even after Buttercup was doomed to forever be a fallen hero.

She had to keep the world from experiencing the pain she had inflicted ever again. Even if the evidence in her memories changed from moment to moment, the end goal of her life was driven into her soul, as if a claw had clamped it in place to the purpose would be clear.

She had to take Blossom and Bubbles down with her. Not by taking their lives, necessarily. Just by demoralizing them to the point where they wouldn't meddle with the issues of the world, and harm it or themselves in the process.

And with that mission, Buttercup awoke. She woke up suddenly, with a refreshing surge of strength and healing radiating from her left wrist inwards, and then back out. Buttercup turned her head.

Hanging next to her bed was a bag labeled "Blood – 500 cc, Type X." Next to that was Blossom, looking incredibly happy at the moment but still carrying the obvious signs of recent stress and tears.

Buttercup should have been overjoyed that her sister was right there, by her side, when she needed to be. But, with a pang of self-loathing, she could only focus on the fact that she would somehow have to destroy this poor bastard.


End file.
